Gleave himself came under fire immediately afterwards and discovered he was in the midst of a mass of 109s. ‘Tracers passed above and below, curving downwards and giving the impression of flying in a gigantic cage of gilt wire.’6
The large numbers of aircraft increased the rawness and intimacy of combat. Dennis Armitage remembered ‘the flick of an aircraft’s belly as you shot underneath not ten feet below at a relative speed of ten miles a minute’.7 The fighter pilots were shooting at machines, but at such close quarters it was impossible to ignore the fact that inside them were men. ‘It was really quite a shock,’ Brian Kingcome said later, ‘when suddenly an aeroplane you were firing at would erupt bodies. It brought it home to you…that there were actually people in there who you were killing.’8
To the novice fighter pilot, the overwhelming feeling when confronted by all this apparent chaos was bewilderment. Non-aviators, when taken through the manoeuvres of a dogfight, are made immediately aware of how extraordinarily disorienting even the most basic moves can be. Sky and earth, left and right, up and down, alternate at intervals of fractions of a second, allowing no time for adjustment. Thought, in fact, has little part in the proceedings. Fighter pilots in extremis operate on instinct. Flying a hugely powerful, nimble and sensitive machine is a feat in itself. Flying one in such a way as to bring guns to bear on another fast and manoeuvrable target, while avoiding being shot oneself in the process, is considerably more difficult.
Many of those now sitting at dispersal were attempting to do the second while still having barely mastered the first. The squadrons were better manned than they had been at any time since the spring. Dowding got 53 volunteers from Bomber Command and the Army Co-operation squadrons, and the Fleet Air Arm also contributed. But the high number of pilots ‘on state’ had still mainly been achieved by compressing training courses and rushing novices into action. It was painful but unavoidable. No amount of practice was sufficient preparation for battles that were unprecedented in size and intensity and whose tactics evolved every day.
Inevitably the untried pilots were often quick to fall. There were at least two cases of pilots being killed on the day they reported to their squadron. Flying Officer Arthur Rose-Price arrived at Kenley on the morning of 2 September to join 501 Squadron and was immediately sent on patrol. In the afternoon he went off on another sortie and was shot down over Dungeness. Pilot Officer Jaroslav Sterbacek turned up at 310 Squadron at Duxford on 31 August. Within a few hours he was over the Thames estuary, attacking Dornier 17s. By the evening he was dead, shot down by Me 109s. Both men were practised pilots. Rose-Price held a short-service commission before the war and had been an instructor. Sterbacek had served with the Czech air force and later with the Armée de l’Air. Neither of them had any real combat experience. As was shown repeatedly, flying skill alone did not guarantee success as a fighter pilot, nor necessarily improved chances of survival.
Terence Lovell Gregg, a New Zealander, who at seventeen was the youngest pilot to receive a flying licence in Australasia, had spent the war as an instructor and on operations room duties when he was given command of 87 Squadron in the second week of July. He was acutely aware of his lack of practical knowledge and allowed his flight commanders to lead the squadron until he felt he was ready. On 15 August an order came to intercept a formation of a hundred Stukas and Messerschmitts. Lovell Gregg felt the time had come to take command in the air. He took off with eight of his pilots, including Roland Beamont, who was surprised to find they were setting course directly for the approaching Germans. ‘I just had time to think, “I wonder what sort of tactic he’s going to employ. Is he going to turn up-sun and try and dive out of the sun at them or go round to the right and come in behind?”’ To his pilots’ alarm it became clear he was going to do neither. Instead he ‘bored straight into the middle…we seemed to be going into the largest formation of aeroplanes you ever saw. Then his voice came on the radio and said: “Target ahead, come on chaps, let’s surround them!” Just nine of us.’9 Lovell Gregg’s Hurricane was soon in flames. He tried to land, crashed into a copse and was killed.
Most of the victims of the fighting of August and September had joined their squadrons before July, and had at least had some time to learn control procedures and get a taste of what was coming before the all-out assault began. But among the dead there were also those who had gone into battle hopelessly unprepared. Many were sergeants who had come through the RAFVR, like Geoffrey Gledhill, who arrived at 6 Operational Training Unit at Sutton Bridge on 6 July for his fighter training. After only four weeks he was posted to 238 Squadron at Middle Wallop. A week later he was shot down and killed.
Pilot Officer Neville Solomon, another RAFVR graduate, was particularly unfitted for action. After basic training he had been taught to fly Blenheim fighter bombers, then abruptly sent on 19 July to join 17 Squadron at Debden. When it became clear he had no Hurricane experience, he was sent back to Sutton Bridge for a conversion course. He was back after twenty days, on 15 August. Three days later, apparently after his first sortie, he was reported missing. He was not around long enough for the squadron diarist to learn to spell his name correctly and is referred to as ‘Soloman’ in the three sparse mentions he receives.
In 54 Squadron Al Deere received two replacement pilots from New Zealand who had never previously flown a Spitfire and made just two trips in a Hurricane. There was only time to take them up in a Miles Master trainer, then brief them on the controls of the Spitfire. ‘They’d go off for one solo flight and circuit. Then they were into battle…These two lasted two trips and they both finished up in Dover hospital. One was pulled out of the Channel. The other landed by parachute.’10 During the phoney war, pilots would get at least twenty-five hours’ experience on a Spitfire before being posted. Some of the longer-serving pilots tried to pass on what knowledge they could. In 87 Squadron, Roland Beamont would ‘take our new pilots and put them in the hands of our most experienced pilots and send them off to do dogfight practices…The experienced pilot by demonstration would show the junior just how little he knew about it and give him tips as to what he could do to improve his skills, because there were ways you could use your aeroplane to better advantage once you knew it very well. The essence of combat flying was to know your aeroplane’s absolute limits so that when you were called upon to use them you could actually get to the limits of the performance without endangering you or the aeroplane.’11
For most incoming pilots, though, the learning process was not so gentle. In 616 Squadron, where Denys Gillam was a flight commander, an effort was made ‘to give replacement pilots a sporting chance. I always had one as my number two. The trouble was that they had too little experience. The average amount of flying they’d done was about 100 to 120 hours only and their entire attention was focused on the ability to fly the plane rather than to fight. One could get them to the battle reasonably well, but once it was joined they were sitting ducks.’12 David Cox, a sergeant pilot with 19 Squadron, was taken under the wing of Flying Officer Leonard Haines. ‘I can give credit to him for the fact that I stayed alive as long as I did,’ he said later. ‘He used to say, just keep my tail wheel in front of you and just stick to me. Don’t worry about shooting things. If you can follow me, you’ll learn to throw a Spitfire about, which I did.’13
Others doubted the value of the practice. Bob Doe, who had spent the summer with 234 Squadron in the West Country and destroyed at least five German aircraft, noticed that ‘when action happened an experienced pilot would treat his plane purely as a gun platform, which meant that he wouldn’t know what was happening to his plane or his number two…Although this phase only lasted for a matter of seconds, his poor number two would be concentrating on staying with his leader, who was doing impossible things with his machine, and at the most dangerous time he would not be seeing the enemy around him.’14
John Worrall of 32 Squadron rejected three newcomers who arrived without having passed through an Operational Training Unit,
considering they would weaken the unit and that sending them into action was tantamount to condemning them to death. Sailor Malan took a tougher view. One of his young pilots was clearly never going to succeed as a fighter pilot. He was, he told his biographer, ‘a boy born to be killed. You knew or felt that it was only a question of time before he was picked off.’ But Malan felt that ‘the cruellest thing in the world would have been to tell him to drop out of the flight, and recommend him for an operational training unit. He had lots of guts. He struggled very hard to be a good pilot. But everything was against him.’15 Fate took its course. ‘We were on patrol one day with this boy flying No. 4 astern. Then suddenly, looking round, he had gone. A Jerry must have sneaked up behind and picked him off.’
The demand for pilots meant standards, inevitably, were relaxed. Candidates who would have been rejected before the war now made it into Fighter Command. Eustace Holden, a twenty-eight-year-old flight commander with 501 Squadron, remembered a new arrival who was ‘nice enough, but it was easy for me to see that he shouldn’t have been there…He thought it was marvellous to be in this front-line squadron, but he wasn’t good enough. I could see him being shot up in no time at all.’ Holden took him to one side and ‘had a few words…I said that I wasn’t at all sure that he was up to it and I thought it better if he left the squadron. The poor chap was very nearly in tears and it made me feel awful but I still thought that he should go.’ Later, the whole squadron took off on an interception. ‘This one chap was lagging behind, why I don’t know. There were three Messerschmitts up above…I kept telling him to come on, come on, catch up. And sure enough one of these chaps came whizzing down and shot him down in the Channel, and he was never seen again. I blamed myself for that.’16
Bad weather between 19 and 24 August brought a respite from the grinding routine of daily heavy raids. The pause coincided with another reassessment by Goering of the direction the battle was taking. The impression of overwhelming force created by masses of aircraft moving inexorably in rigid formation towards their targets was misleading. The Luftwaffe was suffering badly. On 15, 16 and 18 August it lost more than fifty aircraft each day and human losses were heavy. Among the casualties were 172 officers, dead, seriously wounded and missing, including 23 of senior rank. The morale of the crews was fraying. The German fighter pilots were at least as tired as their British counterparts. They got little leave or time off. One commander, Oberst Carl Viek, based at Wissant overlooking the Channel, tried to keep his men on the ground in bad weather and send them off for a swim, and forbade those he judged to be closest to cracking up from flying. This attitude earned him a reprimand from his headquarters for ‘softness’.
On 19 August Goering summoned his commanders for another conference and another blast of criticism. He blamed the bomber losses on the failure of the fighters to give proper protection, only just stopping short of an outright accusation of cowardice. The charge ignored the by now obvious fact that it was impossible for an Me 109 to keep up with a Stuka once it went into its dive. Also, as he must have known, the fighters were severely restricted in the time they could spend shepherding the bombers by the amount of fuel they could carry. Bomber crews often watched in dismay as the Messerchmitts left them to their fate and turned away to run for home before their petrol gave out.
Goering insisted that the fighters’ main task now was the close escort of the bombers. He dismissed the expert view of experienced men like Galland that the most effective way of dealing with the British fighters was free hunts, which by some estimates accounted for the majority of the RAF’s losses. The Me 109s would now also have to cover the Me 110s, which had proved themselves vulnerable. Fighters would be protecting fighters. The Stukas, Goering conceded, were fatally unsuited for the job. They would be withdrawn until they could fulfil their proper role of supporting the army when it finally blitzed a path across Britain. The performance would not have been complete without some bloodletting. Several commanders were dismissed, and younger more aggressive officers promoted, among them Galland.
On the same day, Dowding and Park conducted their own analysis. Following the meeting, the sector controllers in 11 Group were issued with new instructions that augmented other orders issued two days previously, designed to close the loopholes in the defence revealed by the preceding ten days of heavy fighting. Between 8 and 16 August, Fighter Command had lost about ninety pilots and another fifty had been wounded, many of them seriously. With the aircraft problem on its way to being solved, pilots were Dowding’s most precious resource. The ability to resist depended on suppressing losses to a level that maintained continuity and experience in squadrons, allowing them continuously to regenerate themselves and maintain their effectiveness. It was essential to reduce casualties, impossible to halt them. Dowding and Park resolved that the lives that were going to be lost should be expended in the most effective manner possible.
Preventing pilots from flying over the sea was one way of stemming losses. In addition, orders were again issued to controllers and commanders to stop squadrons taking on German fighters as they swooped in over the coast on free hunts. Park had tried to hold his fighters back from these costly clashes, but the encounters had persisted. It was now emphasized heavily that the overwhelming priority was to knock down the bombers, an approach which, it was hoped, would limit the damage done to the airfields, further injure the Luftwaffe’s morale and on the British side slow the attrition of fighters, and more importantly of pilots.
The survival of the fighter bases, particularly the 11 Group sector aerodromes, Northolt, Tangmere, Kenley, Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, North Weald and Debden, had become an overwhelming concern. They were the junction boxes in Fighter Command’s control system in the south-east. They housed the sector operations rooms which responded to the information coming in from radar and the Observer Corps and juggled the available resources to meet each threat. Their destruction or serious disruption would paralyse Fighter Command’s protective reflexes. The British inferiority in numbers meant survival depended on advance knowledge of the direction and dimensions of German attacks and a command and control structure that made the most efficient use of assets. Without it, the RAF would be fighting blind and weight of numbers would inevitably carry the day.
The key stations had got off lightly in the opening phase of the assault as the Luftwaffe’s faulty intelligence and misconceptions directed it to RAF bases which were unconnected with the immediate defensive effort. But the devastation done to Tangmere on 16 August, and the raid on Kenley two days later, which destroyed most of the hangars and forced the evacuation of the sector operations room, suggested the German aim was improving. Park ordered the controllers to ensure that, when the squadrons based around London were in the air fending off mass attacks, 12 Group be asked to provide patrols to protect the sector bases north of the Thames at Debden, North Weald and Hornchurch.
On 24 August, with Goering’s admonitions ringing in their ears, the Luftwaffe commanders in France resumed their attack on the RAF in the air, and now increasingly on the ground. The first targets were Hornchurch, North Weald and Manston. Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the commander of 12 Group, was called on to provide cover in keeping with Park’s new directive. Only 19 Squadron turned up at North Weald in time to get in a few shots with their still-malfunctioning cannons before the raiders departed. The rest were guided to their destinations by the columns of smoke and fire rising into the clear afternoon sky. The raids destroyed messes, stores and living quarters and a few aircraft, but barely affected the bases’ ability to operate.
The disappointing performance by 12 Group was to mark the start of a feud fought out at the highest levels throughout the rest of the summer, and it opened a debate on tactics that rumbled on into the post-war years. Leigh-Mallory believed that the most effective way to deploy fighters was en masse, grouped together in what came to be known as a ‘Big Wing’. He had tried to assemble such a force over Duxford before sending it to the rescue of
the north London stations, but there had been confusion over the order. It took time to put a formation of fifty to sixty aircraft together – at least three-quarters of an hour, even when conditions were ideal. The delay meant that, according to Tom Gleave, speaking later as a distinguished RAF historian, ‘of thirty-two Big Wings launched by 12 Group, only seven met the enemy and only once did a Big Wing arrive first at its intended point of interception’.17 Despite this dismal record and the almost universal scepticism of the pilots, Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader, regarded as the author of the idea, persisted in championing the tactic after the war and insisting that a battle-winning innovation had been wilfully neglected.
On the night of 24 August bombs fell on central London for the first time since 1918. Goering had given his commanders the right to choose where they should aim their attacks, reserving for himself the right to order the bombing of Liverpool and London. Hitler did not, at this stage, wish to jeopardize the chance of a political settlement by a massacre of civilians. On the night of 24th/25th a fleet of more than a hundred bombers set off westwards across the Channel to resume their bombardment of Short’s aircraft factory at Rochester and the oil storage farm at Thameshaven. Instead of unloading their explosives, however, they flew on, unmolested by night fighters, and dumped their bombs on the department stores of Oxford Street, City offices, the terraced streets of Stepney, Finsbury, Bethnal Green and East Ham. The breach of orders was blamed on an error in navigation. Goering, anticipating a storm of rage when Hitler heard the news, demanded to know who was responsible and threatened the guilty with a transfer to the infantry. The error detonated an explosive chain of events. The following night, eighty-one Wellington and Hampden bombers flew to Berlin and dropped incendiary bombs, most of which landed in open country and allotments, and leaflets. The raid was followed, on Churchill’s orders, by others on 28, 30 and 31 August, and would accelerate a dynamic that was to have dire consequences for Londoners in the months ahead.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 34