For the moment, though, the bombing of central London appeared an aberration. The Luftwaffe continued its daylight pounding of the airfields. On 25 August the weight of the attacks shifted to the south and west and attacks were launched on Portland, Weymouth and Warmwell airfield in Dorset. The raid on Warmwell was intercepted by Hurricanes from 17 Squadron and only a handful of bombers got through, hitting two hangars and destroying, with a lucky bomb, the station’s telephone and teleprinter cables. On the morning of 26 August the attacks swung back to the 11 Group airfields, with a formation of forty Heinkels and twelve Dorniers making for Biggin Hill. In keeping with the new orders, they were protected by eighty Me 109s and some Me 110s, a ratio of almost two to one. Park sent up seventy Hurricanes and Spitfires and a handful of Defiants to block them, and the raid was eventually turned away without reaching its target. The second wave was aimed at Debden and Hornchurch. This time forty Dorniers were protected by eighty Me 110s and forty 109s. By the time they approached their targets, however, the escorts were running low on fuel. The increasingly apparent vulnerability of the Me 110s meant that the effective strength of the fighter screen was the forty Me 109s, who had the schizophrenic task of fending off attacks on both bombers and their fellow fighters.
The raid began to falter before it reached Debden, with most of the bombers turning south shortly after crossing the Essex coast. Half a dozen Dorniers pressed on unprotected, and dropped bombs that killed three airmen, destroyed buildings and severely damaged an aircraft. The Hornchurch raid was aborted before it reached its target. A third wave was launched in the afternoon against Portsmouth and Southampton, and was also repulsed without significant damage being done to targets. Fifteen bombers had been shot down for no real result. The bomber crews and their commanders complained that they were still not receiving adequate protection, a charge that cannot have been amiably received from the fighter units, which lost fifteen Me 109s and five Me 110s, the former paying the price of trying to protect the latter.
But this was a battle of attrition. Fighter Command’s satisfaction at having beaten off the attacks was tempered by the knowledge that victory or defeat would be determined by the ability of Fighter Command to absorb protracted punishment. At its simplest that meant having a steady supply of men and machines to replace losses. But equally important was the quality of morale and the maintenance of squadrons as functioning fighting units.
A day like 26 August could have a devastating effect on the fabric and spirit of a squadron. No. 616 Squadron had arrived at Kenley on 19 August, having spent most of the summer in Leconfield in Yorkshire, and was anxious to get into the action. Hugh Dundas recorded that, ‘Joy and jubilation marked our last hours at Leconfield’. Before setting off there was a genial lunch in the mess with plenty to drink. Most of the original auxiliary pilots were still there. Dundas reflected afterwards that ‘it never occurred to us that we should not continue together indefinitely’.
They arrived at the new station to a sobering scene. Kenley had been blitzed the day before. Wrecked aircraft and lorries littered the edge of the field and the landing ground was dotted with newly filled craters. The atmosphere in the officers’ mess ‘was taut and heavily overlaid with weariness. Both the station operations staff and the pilots of 615 Squadron [who were based there]…showed signs of strain in their faces and behaviour. The fierce rage of the station commander when a ferry pilot overshot the runway while landing a precious replacement Spitfire was frightening to behold.’
On 26 August, Spitfires of 616 were scrambled and directed to Dover and Dungeness in anticipation of the first raid of the day. They arrived too late to attack the incoming Heinkels, but were quickly set upon by the accompanying Me 109s. George Moberly’s aircraft was hit and he baled out. His parachute failed to open and he plunged into the sea to his death. Sergeant Marmaduke Ridley, an ex-apprentice who had joined the squadron early in 1940, was also killed. Teddy St Aubyn, the aristocratic ex-Guards officer and ante-room wit, was shot down and badly burned.
Moberly had learned to fly privately after leaving Ampleforth, the Catholic public school, and had been one of the first two officers to join the squadron. He visited Dundas the day before in hospital at Canterbury, where he was recovering after being shot down. ‘He talked to me about personal affairs, about his family and his property,’ Dundas wrote. ‘He told me that he wanted me to have his personal belongings if he were killed. I had a strong feeling that he had a premonition that he would be.’18 Moberly’s death was particularly painful for Denys Gillam, who counted him as his best friend in the squadron.
Two other pilots, Roy Marples and William Walker, were shot down the same day. Walker, who had been posted to the squadron from the RAFVR, which he joined while a young trainee executive at a brewery, had been woken that morning at 3.30 a.m. by his orderly with a cup of tea. There was a first breakfast at 4 a.m., the usual sombre affair eaten in silence. If pilots were still at dispersal at 8 a.m., a second breakfast – eggs, bacon, sausages, coffee – would be brought out. Walker was to be grateful for his second breakfast that day. He took off with Yellow Section, made up of himself, St Aubyn and Ridley, and was caught when the Me 109s pounced over Dungeness. He decided to bale out, but when he tried to leave found he was still attached to the cockpit by the radio lead fixed to his flying helmet. ‘I took off my helmet and fell out. I was still at 20,000 feet and pulled the ripcord. The sky, which moments before had been so full of aircraft, was now without a single plane in view. I had no idea where I was and 10/10th cloud below obscured any view of land. It seemed to take ages to reach the clouds, and eventually on passing through them I was concerned to see that I was over the Channel.’ Walker sensibly kicked off his heavy flying boots and watched them spiral down for ‘what seemed like ages’. Splashing down and releasing his harness, he looked around, saw land, but did not know whether it was England or France. He noticed the hull of a wrecked boat protruding from the water, swam to it, clambered up and awaited rescue. He was now very cold and very tired. He was, in fact, close to the Kent coast. The wreck he was sitting on was one of many that had come to grief on the Goodwin Sands. After half an hour a fishing boat appeared and he was helped aboard and given tea and whisky.
He was taken into Ramsgate harbour, cheered by a small crowd of civilians, given a packet of ten Player’s cigarettes – the Fighter Boys’ favourites – and taken to hospital, where his injured leg was examined. He was put to bed under a canopy of electric lights, which it was hoped would thaw his hypothermia. It was eight hours before he warmed up. The hospital had been bombed and the kitchen was out of action. The only food available was two slices of bread and butter. The following day he was put in an ambulance to be taken to the RAF hospital at Halton in Buckinghamshire. On the way they had to pick up an airman from Manston, shell-shocked after the almost constant bombardment. They passed by Kenley so Walker could pick up some kit. He then told the driver to take him to dispersal so he could bid au revoir to his comrades. To his dismay, ‘hardly any pilots remained. I had not heard of the appalling losses…nor had I heard of what had happened to the other members of Yellow Section’. The ambulance picked its way across London, taking detours where the roads were closed by bombing. The seventy-mile journey from the coast took almost twelve hours.19
Within eight days of arriving at Kenley, 616 Squadron lost five pilots killed or missing, with five others hospitalized. Half of the pilots who had flown down in high spirits from Leconfield were gone. Denys Gillam, who although only a flight commander was effectively leading the squadron, asked for it to be given a week’s rest to train up replacement pilots. ‘It was very unpopular to suggest that the squadron should be taken out of the line for a short time to give them the chance to recover,’ he said later. ‘They wouldn’t do it and Dowding was very put out by this and kept us there another week. By then we were down to about four pilots.’20 On 2 September, Gillam was shot down and wounded, and the following day the remaining pilots moved to the relativ
e safety of Coltishall, near Norwich, to re-form.
The blitz on airfields continued on 28 August. By now a pattern had developed in which Luftwaffe attacks came in distinct phases. The first wave arrived over the Kent coast at breakfast time and split up, with one formation heading west and the other turning north towards Rochford. Fighters were sent up, including twelve Defiants, which went in to attack the bombers, oblivious to the Me 109s hiding in the sun. Four Defiants were shot down and three damaged. Five of the crew were killed. One, Flight Lieutenant Robert Ash, who had given up a risk-free job in the general duties branch at the relatively advanced age of thirty to volunteer for air-crew duty, had baled out but was found dead. There was a strong suspicion that he had been shot while dangling from his parachute. When a second raid approached Rochford later in the day, the remaining crews clamoured to go into action, but this was refused. The inevitable, lethal consequences of deploying Defiants in daylight were at last recognized. Henceforth, they would only fly at night.
The third phase, as shown on the radar, appeared to be another bombing attack aimed at sector airfields, and six groups of fighters were ordered up to intercept. Instead of bombers they found Me 109s and 110s, and the Hurricanes and Spitfires were lured into just the sort of costly and unproductive clash Dowding and Park were so desperate to avoid. Six German machines were shot down, but so, too, were six British fighters and four pilots killed.
Among them was Noel Benson of 603 Squadron. After the war, it was the thought of the novice pilots going unprepared to their deaths that the public found particularly poignant. The fact was that in the fighting of August and September death came evenly, falling on the experienced and the debutant alike. Benson went into battle fully trained, with only some inkling of the nature of what he was confronting but touchingly eager for the fray. He had been to Sedburgh public school before Cranwell, from where he graduated in October 1939. Benson, nicknamed ‘Broody’ because he got despondent if not flying, finally got his wish for action when the squadron moved to Hornchurch from Turnhouse in Scotland on 27 August. It had been engaged until then in night flying and occasional attempted interceptions of German intruders. Benson’s impatience glows through one letter home. ‘I am enclosing a photo that a chap took at Montrose,’ he wrote. ‘I am in the cockpit starting up the engine to go off on a genuine interception. I believe that at the time some trawlers were being attacked but as usual, the enemy went into the low clouds as soon as we appeared.’
Benson was as well prepared as it was possible to be without having experienced full-scale combat. His commanding officer wrote to his father after his death: ‘Your son was an excellent pilot with all his wits about him and he was the last of the squadron I had expected to lose.’ He lasted just one day. George Prior, an ex-serviceman who had served at Gallipoli, was standing outside his cottage at Leigh Green near Tenterden in Kent on the evening of 28 August, watching seven German aircraft overhead. He later described in a letter how ‘a single British plane suddenly dived into them from above, the pilot tackling them single handed. He was hit at once by one of the enemy and I saw smoke pouring from his machine. He then turned and dived towards the ground to about 1,000 feet to save himself, then straightened out.’ Prior believed that Benson had deliberately stayed with his aeroplane to steer it away from farm buildings. ‘He could certainly have saved himself before his plane got further alight: instead he went on, avoiding the farm etc. and all the houses and the post office and a large Army Service Corps depot…he drove on with his machine now ablaze. I saw the flames yards behind it and he had no chance then. He gave his life to save us all at Leigh Green.’ He finally crashed a few fields away. By the time Prior reached the spot, ‘his machine was a charred mass of metal…he met his death in this last act of self-sacrifice’.21
Mr Prior wrote his letter at the request of another resident of Leigh Green, Mrs Marguerite Sandys, who campaigned for several months for Benson to be awarded some posthumous medal, but the request was turned down by the Air Ministry. The gratitude of the villagers was an indication of how civilians and airmen were being drawn closer together. Ordinary people were in the war now. Many knew all too well what aerial bombardment was like. On 24 August Portsmouth had been subjected to a four-minute blitz by 250-kilo bombs dropped by Ju 88s, which slipped through a fighter screen and laid waste the naval base as well as the town, killing 107 civilians and injuring 237.
The advent of night-time raids disrupted the lives of millions. Fighter Command issued warnings to local defence authorities of likely raids, classed from yellow, the lowest threat, through purple, to red. Officials erred on the side of caution. The bombers roamed far and wide as they reached out beyond coastal cities to the industrial Midlands and the north. The sleep of everyone in their paths was ruined as people made their way to shelters and the war production effort slowed as factories switched off the electricity until the raiders had left.
Nowhere in the south-east felt entirely safe. Bombers would jettison their loads at random when running for home. Pete Brothers moved his wife away from Biggin Hill to what he thought would be the safety of the small town of Westerham, about five miles away. One late afternoon in August she was preparing for a visit from her husband. ‘She was getting ready, sitting in her bedroom with the windows open putting on her lipstick and so on, when someone dropped a bomb and a splinter came in through the open window and smashed her mirror. That got me pretty angry. It could have gone into the back of her head.’22 Brothers moved her to Lancashire to stay with his parents.
Fighters on free hunts occasionally strafed roads and villages. Joan Lovell Hughes, who was later to marry Christopher Foxley-Norris, was working on a farm at Penshurst in Kent. The excitement of watching the fighting overhead was tempered by the danger from the Luftwaffe. ‘The boys, when they’d downed somebody, used to come low over the field, waggling their wings and we would shout, “Well done!” But there were also nasty times when the Germans came over and they would drop their bombs and shoot at anything that moved…One night I was cycling alone on my own and a lone raider came along, low, so I flung myself in a hedge and it fired at me and missed…They fired at anything that was moving.’23
Despite the increasing threat they had posed to the civilian population, crashed German crews could expect decent treatment. Oberleutnant Rudolf Lamberty was forced to crash-land his Dornier 17 near Biggin Hill on 18 August. Climbing out of the flaming wreckage, he saw some ‘very excited Home Guard men with shotguns…they pointed their guns at me. I was busily engaged in putting out the fire on both my sleeves.’ During the confrontation, another raid came in, and everyone threw themselves to the ground while bomb splinters tore the air around them. When the German aircraft had departed, Lamberty and the rest of his crew were led along a road to the entrance to the base. On the way they met some civilians. ‘The first question they asked was: “Are you glad it’s all over for you?” But we weren’t and said so.’ Lamberty wanted to get rid of his parachute and offered it to one of the curious civilians, telling him it would make good silk shirts. He asked for help getting his cigarettes as his hands were too badly burned to open his tunic pocket. Someone retrieved them, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. They were surprised to see the cigarettes were English. Lamberty had bought them in Guernsey a few days previously. He was driven to the base hospital, where he was given a cup of tea with a straw to drink it through. His face was smeared with Tannifax anti-burn cream and he was brought food. Lamberty was unable to eat it as the inside of his mouth was burned. The nurses misunderstood and brought him a different dish to see if that would tempt him. He and another officer were taken to a room for a mild interrogation, but ‘they saw we were not capable and left it’.24 Next day he was transferred to a civilian hospital.
Such courtesy was conditional on the defeated behaving themselves. After a raid on Tangmere in which two airmen were killed, a captured German crew happened to be marched past the bodies. One of the Germans, 601 Squadron’s h
istorian recorded, was imprudent enough to laugh. ‘A senior RAF officer who was walking to meet them lengthened his stride and punched the German on the nose. That evening the prisoners were given brooms and made to sweep up the bomb debris in the hangars.’25
The method of dealing with the German raiders, as they threw themselves repeatedly against Fighter Command’s defences, evolved continuously, refined and adjusted by bitter experience. Whatever Park might say about the necessity of concentrating on the bombers, it was impossible to do so effectively without protection. By now a rough division of labour had evolved between Hurricanes and Spitfires. Hurricanes, it was agreed, were slower, but in compensation were sturdier in construction and provided a more stable gun platform. To them fell the job of shooting down bombers. The Spitfires, with their greater speed and manoeuvrability and higher operational altitude, were more suited to fending off the Me 109s and 110s hovering overhead.
The defending fighters were almost invariably greatly outnumbered by those they were attacking. As always, a fighter pilot’s tactical position was greatly improved if he was flying higher than the enemy and coming at them from out of the sun. It was a constant complaint by squadrons that they were scrambled too late to climb to an ideal attacking height. Pilots operating from the forward coastal bases were at a particular disadvantage as they had even less time to react before the raiders were overhead or gone. Some commanders used their own initiative and flew inland to gain height before turning back in the direction of the enemy. The first aim of the attacks was to try and split up the disciplined ranks of the bombers. This disrupted the field of covering fire the gunners could provide for each other, churned up the formation into smaller and less defensible groups and separated individual machines from the warmth of the pack, making them much easier to pick off.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 35