Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  The ability of units to absorb deaths and injuries was reinforced by the knowledge that, however heavy their own losses, the German toll in men and machines was greater. The daily official tally put out by the Air Ministry and reported in the press and on the BBC was invariably exaggerated, inflating the number of German aircraft destroyed and minimizing the wastage on the British side. The pilots, who contributed to the inflation by their own understandable habitual overclaiming, believed them, and the figures were an important factor in maintaining morale. But it was essentially true that the balance of destruction lay in the RAF’s favour. On only one day in August the 29th, were German and British losses roughly equal.

  The Luftwaffe was suffering. The crews had been told regularly by their superiors that Fighter Command was down to its last handful of fighters, yet every day the Spitfires and Hurricanes were still there waiting for them, aggressive and unbowed. They began to wonder how much longer they could go on. Being shot up in a bomber, limping home over the hated sea, was a harrowing business. The Heinkel of Major H. M. Wronsky was hit by anti-aircraft fire near Portsmouth on the night of 31 August/l September. ‘We saw flames right away; the starboard engine was on fire and we thought the whole machine must burn.’ They turned back out to sea and smothered the engine with foam from extinguishers, scrabbling for their parachutes that were stacked up against a bulkhead. As they approached the French coast, they saw a British bombing raid in progress near Calais and swung away so as not to be mistaken for a raider. It was clear that they would never make their home base at Villacoublay near Paris. The decision was made to jump, but in their haste they had put their parachutes on upside down and no one could locate their ripcord. By the time the mistake had been sorted out they were too low to bale out.

  The ground rose up in front of us – a hill. The machine struck and tore across the top of the hill, ploughing through bushes. We lay there all injured. One man had been so badly cut on the head that he died later. Another man had been hurled right through the perspex of the nose…I had a broken nose, broken foot, broken arm. We lay there in the sudden quiet, listening to a hissing noise. We thought it was fire, that trapped and injured as we were, we should be burned to death. But it was only the oxygen bottles. The port engine had been hurled right out of the machine and was lying eighty yards in front.38

  Day after day the British pilots were inflicting heavy punishment on the raiders. But the Germans continued to come. As August turned into September there appeared no let-up in the grinding, sapping routine. On 31 August the British fighters suffered their heaviest losses so far, with forty aircraft destroyed, nine pilots killed and eighteen badly wounded, half of them burnt. On 1 September Biggin Hill was hit again. The following day there were four major attacks on airfields and aircraft factories. The pattern was maintained until 6 September. Among the 11 Group squadrons absorbing most of the violence, exhaustion was now a permanent condition. ‘The Luftwaffe,’ wrote Peter Townsend, leading 85 Squadron from Croydon, ‘by sheet weight of numbers…was wearing us down; we were weary beyond caring, our nerves taughtened to breaking-point.’ Townsend was one of the victims of 31 August. The Germans arrived while the pilots were grabbing lunch. ‘Their bombs all but hit us as we roared, full-throttle, off the ground. The blast made our engines falter.’ For once, Townsend gave way to his emotions. Until then he had ‘never felt any particular hatred for the German airmen, only anger. This time, though, I was so blind with fury that I felt things must end badly for me. But I was too weary and too strung-up to care.’39 His instinct was accurate. His Hurricane was hit and he was forced to jump. That evening doctors at Croydon hospital extracted a heavy-calibre bullet from his foot. A few days later the squadron, after its two senior flight commanders were killed, was taken out of the line.

  The most buoyant and resilient personalities were now suffering moments of doubt. In Al Deere’s squadron there were only four pilots who had been with him at the start of the summer. His confidence in victory began to falter as he considered the stark reality that he was ‘fighting a war with very inexperienced chaps. That could only get worse, progressively worse.’40 Even Sailor Malan’s granite imperturbability could crumble. One night, he told Archie Winskill later, he was overwhelmed by despondency as he sat in his room in Hornchurch and began to cry. Then he dried his tears, persuaded himself they were only a sign of his extreme tiredness, pushed away the images of the day and tried to sleep.41

  15

  Brotherhood

  Despite the desperation of the situation, the level of optimism among the pilots had remained remarkably high throughout the summer. Fortitude was a Fighter Boy virtue. In its short life the RAF had established a light-hearted tradition of assuming the worst and mocking misfortune. Underneath the careful insouciance lay a thick seam of resolution. The German attack had uncorked something old and potent. ‘It’s surprising how fierce one’s protective instincts become at the sight of an enemy violating one’s homeland,’ Brian Kingcome remarked.1

  Many felt honoured to be fighting, though the conventions of unseriousness meant that few would have admitted as much at the time. The quality of morale varied from squadron to squadron and base to base depending on how much of the fighting they had had to endure. The strain was greatest in 11 Group. Further out in 10 Group and 12 Group there were longer gaps between engagements and the tension was less acute. ‘Nevertheless,’ Roland Beamont said afterwards, ‘no matter where you were, there was this extraordinary spirit. The squadron pilot was encouraged to believe that there wasn’t anything special about the task he had been asked to do – which he had been trained for – and that he was extremely privileged to be in one of the key units in the defence of this country because that was what it was all about…the battle for Britain. Without any exhortation at all, the pilots, all the ground staff, all the people concerned were just reminded quietly by the squadron commanders and the flight commanders, whenever it was necessary, that this was the finest job anybody could have in the world and we were extremely privileged to be doing it.’2

  These softly spoken appeals worked because they were addressed to a fraternity which had already in its short life developed a singular identity and adopted clear values and attitudes. Hectoring, when it was tried, usually had limited results. There were exceptions. Sailor Malan, when he took over 74 Squadron in early August, was regarded as a hard master. ‘Sailor was a very tough nut indeed,’ said Christopher Foxley-Norris. ‘He gave no quarter. If you failed once, you failed.’3 Tony Bartley remembered Malan explaining how he led his men: ‘I kick their arses once a day and I’ve got a good squadron. Otherwise they’d wind up nothing.’4 It was in sharp contrast to the approach adopted by another outstanding leader, Al Deere. ‘Al was a kindly man,’ said Foxley-Morris. ‘Extremely tough but prepared to make allowances and concessions.’

  Discipline, of a traditional military type, was necessary for much that was done in the air. On the ground it jarred. None of the pilots had joined because they were attracted by convention and the comforts of blind obedience. Relations inside squadrons, more than in any other service units, were based on tolerance and laissez-faire. Individualism was respected. At the same time, mutual reliance and the shared dangers inherent in flying tied individuals together. Each unit had a personality and style of its own that its members made an effort to sustain. There was a spirit of collectivity. In the best squadrons there was no room for the self-important. Yet equally, no one was allowed to think themselves insignificant. Doing his rounds of the fighter stations the war artist Cuthbert Orde came to the conclusion that ‘a squadron of pilots can be divided into three groups: natural leaders and fighters at the top; then the main body of solid talent containing the germ of leaders of the future, chaps whose qualities will develop with experience; and then I suppose a tail, two or three perhaps, who will never be quite good enough to earn distinction but who nevertheless are pulling their weight for all it may be worth’.

  What social distinctions had
existed before the start of the summer were eroded by the fighting. The auxiliary squadrons lost their exclusive character as pilots were killed, wounded or posted away. ‘Eventually we got pretty well used to everybody,’ said Peter Dunning-White, an old Harrovian member of Lloyd’s and one of the blades of 601 Squadron before the war. ‘It didn’t matter what kind of type you were as long as you behaved well.’5 The new pilots came from everywhere and every class. Death rubbed out the last traces of the line dividing the pre-war short-service officers and the part-timers from the volunteer reserve. The members of 66 Squadron were, according to Hubert Allen, who served in it, ‘a truly motley throng, consisting of young men from every walk of life. Regular air force officers, sergeant-pilots who had in peacetime been dockhands, clerks, motor-mechanics; there was even an ex-dirt-track motor-cycle expert with us. Every conceivable type was represented.’

  Some of the ‘Clickety-Click’ personalities were revealed in an unsentimental book which came out in 1942. Ten pilots were asked to write a short chapter about themselves and their war. Three others were killed before they could get started. Of those who did contribute, three were dead before the book was published. The pilots appeared under pseudonyms. ‘Bob’ was Flying Officer Bobby Oxspring, the son of an RFC veteran, who joined the RAF on a short-service commission in 1938. Allen described him as ‘a tallish, good-looking, fair-headed bloke, with a typical schoolboy complexion, liable to blush every now and then…he can take his beer like a man, comes from the north and has a typical Yorkshire outlook. A little shy he may appear off-hand at first, but having broken down his barriers of reserve, you would find a loveable, gay, carefree youth of twenty-two years.’ ‘Bogle’ was Flying Officer Crelin Bodie, nineteen, also known as ‘Rob’, who joined on a short-service commission the month after war broke out. He was ‘a strong individualist…decidedly unconventional in appearance, usually wearing a uniform which would not pass muster on a ceremonial parade, with a colourful scarf around his neck and a large sheath-knife in his boot. His language is foul but he possesses more character than anyone I can remember.’

  Pilot Officer John Kendal – ‘Durex’ – who had gone through the RAFVR, was ‘young and noisy…he can imitate every noise conceivable, from an underground train pulling out of a station to the ricocheting of a rifle bullet. Something had to happen before he would shut up. A little of Durex went a long way.’ Sergeant Douglas Hunt, ‘Duggie’, an apprentice at the Bristol Aeroplane Company who joined the RAFVR, had ‘a very droll manner and a terrific scheme about a revolution after the war so that the whole of the country can be governed by pilots’. Last on the list was Sergeant William Corbin, known as ‘Binder’ because he was ‘always moaning, usually about leave. He was the image of George Formby except that he was born in Kent and proud of it.’6

  Corbin was from Maidstone, a builder’s son who had gone to a technical school, then trained to be a maths and science teacher. He had joined the RAFVR in April 1939 and arrived at 66 Squadron at Coltishall on 28 August as a sergeant. His first impression was that the officers were all public-school boys, an observation that did not bother him. His academic abilities, he felt, made him their equal. The distinction in status and privilege between men who were doing the same job and taking the same risks would appear unreasonable and unjust in later years. At the time it seemed much less remarkable and most accepted it, illogical though it clearly was. The maintenance of the division between officer and NCO pilots was a hangover from the inter-war years, when the majority of sergeant pilots were ex-apprentices who had been accepted for flying training but might at any stage be required to return to their old trades.

  By the late summer just under a third of the pilots flying were sergeants, many of them products of the RAFVR. Their duties were indistinguishable from those of officers. They were there, principally, to fly and fight. The decision whether or not to award a commission to a pilot on completing initial training was based on obscure criteria. One consideration was their leadership potential. The practice seems to have been to commission those who fitted most easily into pre-war conceptions of what constituted an officer and a gentleman. That meant public schoolboys and those who looked as if they belonged to the middle or upper class. Even here the formula was shaky. Don Kingaby, who turned out to be one of the best pilots in Fighter Command, was a vicar’s son, and was educated at a public school – King’s, Ely – yet was classed as a sergeant when he finished training in the early summer of 1940. Many sergeant pilots shared the same backgrounds as those who had been classified as their superiors.

  The nature of the RAF required it to be a meritocracy. Its technical essence made it more egalitarian than the other services. In the RAF, more than in the army or navy, it was possible for an expensively educated son of privilege to be under the command of a man who had emerged from the working class. In 74 Squadron Tony Mould, who went to Mill Hill public school, was a sergeant. His squadron leader, Francis White, started his RAF career as an apprentice fitter. The war accelerated the rationalizing process, but in the summer of 1940 odd gradations remained.

  Sergeant and officer pilots went to separate messes and enjoyed different levels of comfort. Away from the front-line stations, in properly appointed bases, officers could still have their own batman or orderly, a privilege which did not extend to the sergeants. Ian Hutchinson was posted from the RAFVR to 222 Squadron in February 1940. At that time, he said later, pilots arriving by that route were ‘regarded as the lowest of the low,’ particularly by the regular sergeant pilots who had arrived in the squadron from the workshops. ‘They treated us differently at first, but when it came to the action then everything disappeared.’

  Hutchinson noted that ‘as an officer you lived rather better. You had a nicer uniform. [As a sergeant] you had a scratchy uniform, although the scratchiness wore off eventually. Your accommodation was not so grand, although you did get individual or double rooms. You didn’t have a batman to wake you up in the morning and make your tea or press your trousers or polish your buttons. You did it yourself. You envied the officers their privileges but nothing more. Nobody felt aggrieved.’7 Maurice Leng, a sergeant with 73 Squadron, agreed. ‘We were very close. There was no officers versus sergeants nonsense. Just a marvellous camaraderie.’8

  Some officers, like Geoffrey Page, found the division stupid. ‘I felt it terribly wrong that a man who hasn’t got an officer’s rank is asked to do exactly the same thing as the officer. You can’t climb out of your aeroplane and then say “Cheerio” and you go off to the officers’ mess and he goes off to the sergeants’ mess. I always thought that it was a very wrong system.’9 Once at dispersal distinctions usually, but not invariably, disappeared. In 41 Squadron under Squadron Leader Hilary Hood, differences between pilots were minimal. Sergeant Frank Usmar remembered Hood as ‘a lovely chap. When you were at dispersal it was nothing for him to say, “Well, if you’ve got half-a-crown, let’s have a game of cards.” And we’d play this innocent game and we’d be one big happy family…We were sitting there waiting for the telephone to ring and to keep your mind off what’s going to happen you play cards and make fun of things.’ Hood was killed on 5 September when his Spitfire collided with that of another squadron member, Flying Officer John Webster, while they were attacking bombers over the Thames estuary.

  The new squadron leader was less convivial. ‘One day the NCOs – that was about half a dozen of us – were sent for to report to the orderly room with our greatcoats on and buttoned up above the throat and buttons polished. We were told by the CO that it was a court martial offence for officers to play cards with the NCOs but they were too much gentlemen to tell us to stay out.’ He ordered them to stop. When the sergeants returned to dispersal, the officers asked why they had been summoned. When they heard the story, they glumly accepted the decision. ‘So we used to lay on our bed in the corner or in the armchair waiting for the bell to ring to scramble, feeling cheesed off and miserable, and the same thing applied to the officers at the oth
er end of the room, longing to play cards or something, but unable to do it.’10

  Off the base, where there was no one to object, sergeants and officers often drank together. The social gap between pilots and ground crews was wider, though some pilots reached across it. John Coghlan, a flying officer with 56 Squadron, known as ‘Slim’, was, according to Corporal Eric Clayton, who maintained his Hurricane, ‘a friendly, amusing and unflappable character, overweight and unfit he perspired freely and had a prodigious intake of ale’. Clayton and his fellow airmen would often bump into him with his girlfriend in their favourite Ipswich pubs, ‘which resulted in beery and jolly evenings’.11 The pointlessness of the distinction was evident from the fact that almost every sergeant pilot flying in the summer of 1940 was sooner or later commissioned. Many sergeant pilots went on to high command. Neil Cameron, a bank clerk who joined the RAFVR and was posted to 1 Squadron at the end of September, ended up Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

  It was in the air that rank held the least meaning. On the occasions when Flying Officer Ben Bowring was called on to lead 111 Squadron and ‘felt he wasn’t qualified’, he asked Sergeant William Dymond, a regular, to take over instead, while he followed behind.12 Yet on the ground flying and fighting prowess did not necessarily increase the standing of those who possessed it. An egalitarian spirit and a propensity for knockabout humour and mickey-taking made the establishment of hierarchies of esteem difficult. Pilots admired success but did not subscribe to the notion of ‘aces’ or show deference to outstanding performers. When an interview with Count Czernin appeared in the London press, in which he spoke freely about his successes, his colleagues in 17 Squadron organized a mock ceremony and awarded him a large cardboard medal. The fact was that most pilots never shot anything down. Fewer than 900 of the 2,330-odd pilots who flew in Fighter Command between July and November claimed victories. There was no shame in that. They knew among themselves that the simple presence of a Hurricane or Spitfire, even if its bullets were not striking home, had a demoralizing effect on the enemy. And they understood very well the courage that was needed simply to maintain yourself in the air.