It was, he recorded, ‘a terrific scrap’. He saw ‘two separate Huns literally disintegrate’. One, a Me 110, had fallen victim to Desmond Sheen, who ‘fired at it and it just blew up’. His shot appears to have ignited a long-range tank fitted underneath. He was enveloped in a cloud of black smoke from the explosion, but ‘started to climb up again and have another go and a 110 came straight down, head-on at me and I shot at it head-on climbing up, and its port engine went up in flames and it went over my head about ten feet away.’17 The squadron claimed fourteen destroyed without loss. As usual, the whirling confusion of the engagement made accuracy impossible and the score would later be revised considerably downwards. But there was no doubt that serious physical and moral damage was inflicted on the raiders. A few pressed on courageously. Others scattered their bombs in the Newcastle area before turning out over the daunting expanse of the North Sea. Squadron after squadron came up to hound them on their way. A second large raid, launched from Ålborg in Denmark, was also heavily punished.
The losses suffered by Luftflotte 5 effectively removed it from the battle. It was never again to mount a significant daylight attack from the north on Britain’s defences. The Germans had lost 20 per cent of their aircraft, with eighty-one air crew killed or missing. In the north there was little to show for it. Driffield airfield had been hammered, but it was a bomber base and the destruction made no difference to the immediate battle. In the south, the raids did much more damage. The airfield at Martlesham, used as a forward base for squadrons from Debden, was heavily bombed and knocked out for forty-eight hours. Middle Wallop was attacked but escaped lightly. Croydon was the worst hit. The bombs smashed into the terminal buildings, where smart travellers had presented themselves in the inter-war years for flights to the Continent, and destroyed hangars and stores. Some bombs had delayed fuses, exploding hours after the aeroplanes had gone. They killed sixty-eight people and cast a pall of nervous gloom over the base. The destruction was terrible but not catastrophic. Croydon was of secondary importance, unlike Kenley, which had apparently been the real target.
The fifteenth of August became ‘Black Thursday’ in the folklore of the German air force. It was a tribute to the Luftwaffe’s morale that the attacks of 16 August were almost as heavy and were pressed home with the same energy as the day before. But, to the increasing concern of the German commanders, the spirit of the defenders appeared as resilient as ever. If anything, resistance seemed to have taken on a more bitter quality, with the British pilots eager to inflict as much punishment as possible. When a raid came in close to Hornchurch just after noon, the nine Spitfires of 54 Squadron sent up to meet it not only prevented the bombers from reaching the aerodrome, but chased them all the way back to the French coast, shooting down three on the way without loss. For once Al Deere was not with them. He had been forced to abandon his machine the previous day after being shot up on a similar sortie, pursuing an Me 109 all the way back to the Pas de Calais.
The grimness of the defenders’ determination was evident in a new tactic, the head-on attack, which began to be adopted by some pilots. It required exceptional sang-froid and was fatal if misjudged. When bombers crossed the Kent coast at Dungeness at noon, 111 Squadron, which had been one of the first units to develop the technique, climbed up to meet them. Among the pilots was Henry Ferriss, who had abandoned his medical studies to take up a short-service commission before the war and had just celebrated his twenty-second birthday. He was one of the most tenacious and experienced pilots in the squadron and had shot down at least nine enemy aircraft. On this day he flew his Hurricane straight towards an approaching Dornier 17 and opened fire. Neither pilot turned away and the two collided and crashed to earth. This event did not dissuade 111 Squadron from continuing with the tactic. Ben Bowring, a Blenheim pilot who answered a call for volunteers for single-seater fighter units, arrived at the squadron a few days afterwards. His motivation was to avenge the death of his best friend, a fellow pilot, George Moore. ‘I didn’t really think of having any fear at the time,’ he said later. ‘What had overcome it was the desire to get one’s own back for everything that was being done to your friends.’18 He found the head-on attacks ‘nerve-racking’ but worth while. The pilots were grimly pleased to notice that, unlike beam or rear attacks, head-on assaults produced an immediate and dramatic effect. ‘You could see the front of the aircraft crumple,’ Bowring said. He also noticed that the bomber pilots reared up from their seats and stumbled backwards in a futile attempt to escape the stream of bullets.
Sheer weight of numbers meant that the Germans still got through. At 1 p.m. on 16 August it was the turn of Tangmere, most bucolic of Fighter Command’s bases, to feel the full force of the German attack. A raid the day before had done some damage before being beaten away by 43 Squadron. This time the Stukas, escorted by Me 109s, gathered in a great buzzing mass over the Isle of Wight. Then, as a signal flare looped down from the lead aircraft, they closed on Tangmere, just across the water, and tipped into their dives. The remaining hangars were flattened, along with the officers’ mess, the station workshops, stores, sick quarters and shelters. Six Blenheims belonging to the fledgling Fighter Interception Unit were wrecked. The bombs killed ten of the ground staff and three civilians.
Most of the Hurricanes of 1, 43 and 601 Squadrons were already in the air, but too late to block the attack. They managed to destroy seven dive-bombers as they fled. Two Hurricanes were shot down during the interception. One of these was flown by Billy Fiske, of 601 Squadron. William Meade Fiske was the son of an international banker from Chicago, an Anglophile who had gone to Cambridge University, married the former wife of the Earl of Warwick, set a record on the Cresta Run and moved in the sporting circles from which 601 Squadron drew its pre-war members. He had volunteered for the RAF two weeks after the outbreak of war and was posted to join his friends in 601 Squadron at Tangmere on 10 July. Fiske was an above-average pilot and a fast learner. He had never flown a Hurricane before making his first flight with the squadron. How he was shot down was never established. He managed to crash-land on the aerodrome and was carried out of the cockpit by an ambulance crew, who reported that he was suffering only from superficial burns on the face and hand. The following day he was visited in hospital by the squadron adjutant who reported that he was ‘perky as hell’.19 But later that day he was dead, apparently having succumbed to shock. Fiske’s social standing and American citizenship ensured that his death was extensively reported. The tragedy also had propaganda uses to a government intent on drawing America into the war. Fiske was presented, plausibly enough, as an idealist who had defied the neutrality laws to fight in the cause of humanity. A plaque was placed in St Paul’s Cathedral to commemorate ‘an American Citizen Who Died That England Might Live’. He was one of eleven pilots from the United States who flew with Fighter Command that summer.
Death was now becoming as familiar to Fighter Command’s rear echelon as it was to the pilots. The ground crews were proving themselves as courageous under fire as the men they supported. When a raid warning was sounded at Warmwell, three 609 airmen, Corporal Bob Smith and Leading Aircraftmen Harry Thorley and Ken Wilson, ran out to wind down the thick steel-plated doors on a hangar to protect the Spitfires inside. A bomb smashed through the roof and all three were killed. The pilots using the airfield as a forward base felt particular sympathy for the airmen stuck on the ground under continuous threat of bombardment but unable to defend themselves. John Nicholas of 65 Squadron watched an airman grimly driving a petrol bowser out to a refuelling point during a raid. The driver was decapitated by a salvo from an Me 109 and the bowser went up in flames. Al Deere and the other 54 Squadron pilots were baffled by the insistence on keeping Manston operational, and hated flying from there. Its advanced position was no advantage. It was too far forward to allow a straight climb up to interception height. It was a great relief to pilots and ground crew when, by the end of the month, the airfield was virtually closed down as a fighter base. ‘T
here seemed no tactical advantage in continuing to use an airfield so far forward, especially when it had such a damaging effect on the morale of the pilots and ground crews,’ Deere wrote later.20 The suspicion was that Fighter Command believed that to pull back would have handed a moral victory to the Luftwaffe. If so, it was uncharacteristically stupid and wasteful thinking on Dowding’s part.
Civilians, too, had now made their first chilly acquaintance with the meaning of aerial warfare. On 16 August bombs fell on the suburbs of south London. The following day the BBC broadcast an eyewitness account by a young woman, Marjery Wace, who had been in Wimbledon when Dorniers passed overhead. She refused to go to a shelter, instead keeping company with a bedridden old lady. ‘The house absolutely shook as if it was made of cardboard,’ she told listeners. ‘It was horribly alarming while it lasted, and I found myself longing to be in the open. I expect if I had been in the open I should have been longing to be in the house.’ After dark she went out to inspect the damage. It was ‘a beautiful August night. I could just see a dim outline of a few people sitting in front of their houses…as I arrived a stream of people began to enter further up the street…they came quietly in groups of three or four. The only sound was from small children crying from sheer weariness as they were carried home by their fathers. And what homes to have to come back to. It was just a small street of small houses, but now the glass had been blown in and the whole insides of the rooms destroyed.’ Two things struck Miss Wace as she walked around. One was that ‘there was a great deal of truth in the soldiers’ attitude to the chances of being hit…it’s simply a question of luck.’ The other was the sight of women patiently cleaning up. ‘There’s a strange impulse in every housewife to go on sweeping whatever state the world is in,’ she observed. ‘For quite a number of people explained to me how they had swept up rooms that they agreed no one could possibly live in again.’21
The violence was widening and deepening, but the pilots could take comfort in the thought that the Germans, in inflicting it, were paying a high price. On 18 August they at last had their revenge on the Stukas. At about 4 p.m. nearly thirty Ju 87s approached the radar station at Poling on the Sussex coast and prepared to attack. The sun was in their eyes, blinding them to the presence of the Hurricanes of 43 Squadron, who swooped in, to be joined by fighters from four more squadrons. The Stukas were just going into their dive when the attack was launched. In the fight that ensued, sixteen dive-bombers were shot down and two more crashed on the way home. The escorting Me 109s offered little protection. Once the Stukas plunged, it was impossible to keep up with them. They managed to catch up with the British fighters after the damage was done, shooting down four Hurricanes and two Spitfires, but losing eight of their own in the process.
The episode persuaded Luftwaffe commanders to withdraw the Ju 87 from the front-line bombing strength for the remainder of the summer fighting, though a few more sorties were flown. News of the losses stoked Goering’s anger at the lack of progress and the elusiveness of the swift victory he had predicted. Once again he called his chief officers to Karinhall to harangue them and issue new directives. Dowding, too, was looking back over ten days of heavy fighting and trying to guess how the battle would develop. Both commanders now knew that the fight would be long and that stamina and morale would decide it.
14
Attrition
Life for the squadrons based in the south was, by the end of August, being lived in a daze of exhaustion, exhilaration and fear. Duty now stretched from dawn to dusk. The day started when the pilots were woken at 4 a.m. and driven out to dispersal, where they ate breakfast in the half-light. Pilots made two, three and four sorties a day, lasting up to an hour each, and on bad days could expect to be in combat on half of them. The weather provided no respite. Of the thirty-seven days from 1 August, twenty-two were ‘fine’ or ‘fair’, culminating in a glorious spell at the end of the month when the summer reached its zenith. There were only ten days during which cloud or rain were recorded anywhere. The pilots came to hate the sight of another cornflower-blue morning and yearned for fog and drizzle.
The fatigue was paralysing. Moving to Kenley from the north, Christopher Foxley-Norris was struck by ‘how incredibly tired people were. They would go to sleep while you were talking to them.’1 Al Deere, sitting down at breakfast after a morning flight, noticed that George Gribble ‘had dropped off to sleep and with his head nodding lower and lower was gently swaying to and fro in his seat, his bacon and eggs untouched in front of him. As we watched, his face pitched forward into his eggs, much to the amusement of the assembled pilots.’2 These blackouts could have potentially fatal results. Denys Gillam was one night ordered up to investigate a raid despite the fact that he had been flying all day, and fell off to sleep in the cockpit. ‘The next thing I knew the speed was building up and there were lights in front of me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and I realized I was upside down diving hard for the ground.’3
In the hectic weeks from August to mid September days off were rare. When they came, many pilots simply went to bed. Sleep came down like a coma. Frank Usmar of 41 Squadron woke up, after ten blissful hours unconscious, to learn that a full-scale raid had taken place while he was out. The hours waiting at dispersal appeared to offer the chance of rest. The pilots lounged in Lloyd Loom chairs or deckchairs, reading magazines, playing chess or draughts or cards, occasionally kicking a football or tossing around a cricket ball or dozing in the heat. There was tea to drink, sometimes beer, and a Naafi van would deliver sandwiches. The smell of cut grass and hedgerow flowers mingled with the stink of high-octane fuel, and the drone of insects overlaid the twanging of plates and wires as the Hurricanes and Spitfires baked in the sun.
But the imminence of danger made it impossible to relax. Every pilot had one ear cocked for the jangle of the telephone and the order to scramble. ‘Hanging around was the worst part, waiting for the bloody phone to ring,’ Robin Appleford, a pilot with 66 Squadron and, at eighteen years old, one of the youngest men flying that summer, said later.4 For years after the war, the sound of a telephone bell would bring a rush of anxiety. But the call did at least dispel the vapour of unease that clung to the dispersal hut in the hours before action. Appleford found that ‘at readiness…you were never actually ready when the order came, but as soon as you started running out to the aircraft, once you started the engine, it was all right’. Frank Usmar also hated the sound of the operations phone. He too noted that ‘when you were running to your machine, the adrenaline took over…Once you got in your aircraft and were roaring away you seemed to have another feeling altogether.’5
The apprehension was sharpened by the knowledge of what lay ahead. Some glimpses of the fighting of August and September have come down to us through snatches of cine-film shot by the few cameraguns to be mounted on fighters at the time. Most of the sequences are only seconds long, but they manage to convey something of the confusion and desperation that flooded each high-velocity encounter. They also make it clear how crowded the sky would become when large numbers of aeroplanes clashed inside a few cubic miles of air. In one clip, filmed by Noel Agazarian as he closed on a bomber, the wing of what looks like an Me 110 flashes out of nowhere across the path of his fighter, missing it by a matter of feet, creating a jolt of shock that carries down the years. Despite the shakiness of the images, we can see the essential drama. The cameras were activated when the guns were fired, so the first thing the viewer notices are the white smudges of tracer crawling out towards the hunted aircraft. Often the intended victim seems oblivious, or impervious, ploughing on through the sky while the skein of bullet trails floats harmlessly by. Sometimes the camera records a kill. The fatal moment is instantly recognizable. A piece of debris detaches itself from the enemy machine and goes spinning by, or a gust of flame flares from an engine. A very few sequences last long enough to record the moment of complete destruction when the bomber erupts in a banner of smoke and fire, blotting out the attacker’s vision as he
swoops through the cloud of debris and burning fuel that is all that is left of his victim.
Official words, particularly the formulas employed by the pilots when, arriving back exhausted after a sortie, they were required by the intelligence officer to fill in an ‘F form’ combat report, were inadequate to describe the extraordinary drama of what was happening. Even afterwards, the participants often found it hard to find language powerful enough to describe the things they had seen and done.
Tom Gleave, who led 253 Squadron at Kenley, succeeded with a vivid account of an encounter with an enormous force of Me 109s cruising above Maidstone at 17,000 feet. ‘Shown up clearly by the sun,’ he wrote, ‘and stretching fore and aft as far as the eye could see were rows of 109s riding above the haze, each row flying in line astern and well spaced out – all of them heading south south-east. It was a fantastic sight.’ Gleave, until now untested in a full-scale battle, was in a section of three Hurricanes. Undeterred by the ludicrously uneven odds, he charged in. Flying into the rows of Messerchmitts, he lined up a target and fired at 175 yards range.
The thin streaks of yellow tracer flame ran parallel for what appeared to be about seventy-five yards and then bent away to the left in a succession of curves. The hiss of pneumatics, the smell of cordite in the cockpit and the feel of the nose dipping slightly under the recoil all lent excitement to the first real combat in my short-lived career at Kenley. Most of my shot appeared to be going into the engine cowling and cockpit. It was the tracer, fired on a turn, which produced the strange illusion of the shot entering at right angles. The Hun flew straight for a while and then turned gently on to his back. After a short burst of about four seconds I stopped firing and as I did so, I saw sunlit pieces of shattered perspex spiralling aft like a shower of tracer. The Hun slewed slightly while on his back, his nose dropped and he dived beneath out of my sight, going straight down.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 33