Yvonne Agazarian became the most envied girl in her convent school, which had been evacuated to Rugby, when her handsome, adored brother Noel arrived to visit her during a leave. ‘The girls were gaga about him,’ she said. ‘He seemed a wonderful, incredible figure.’56 Tony Bartley found that after the Churchill speech fighter pilots were ‘the epitome of glamour. It was unbelievable. They loved us, and I mean loved. They bought us drinks, appreciated everything.’57 On trips to London, Robin Appleford and Rob Bodie would wear their flying boots, ensuring a flow of free drinks and the undivided attention of the girls. The practice of wearing the top button undone was now well known. When men in air force blue walked into a pub, eyes would stray to their tunics and the word would go around that there were Fighter Boys in the bar. The pilots were polite to civilians, sometimes actually welcoming the chance to talk about things other than the fighting. Mostly, though, they preferred the warmth and security of their own company.
The great exception to the rule was women. The attitude of the pre-war RAF had been courtly and correct. At Tangmere, the young women Billy Drake met were the sisters of brother officers or the daughters of family friends. They would attend balls at the station, be entertained to drinks in the ladies’ room in the mess, and in the summer sail and swim. It was all very proper. These were very innocent affairs. You knew the parents. They knew you.’ The raffish life of the RFC pilots was alien to the modern young men of Fighter Command. ‘There was no bought sex as such. If anybody was oversexed they dealt with the situation but they didn’t talk about it.’58
For most respectable young men in 1940 the world of sex was remote and mysterious. War would bring it closer, but for many it would remain out of reach. No one knows how many of those who died in the battles of the year went to their deaths without having slept with a woman. The pilots liked to portray themselves as men of the world. Their upbringings, however, had given them little chance to acquire much sophistication in matters of sex. Most of them had passed their adolescence in classrooms and playing fields before entering service life. The majority of RAFVR entrants had been in conservative jobs where there was little opportunity for revelry. The conservative mores of the time swamped their outlooks, ladled on thickly by the heavy hands of their parents. Paddy Finucane wrote home reassuringly to his mother and father from Rochford on 9 August, after a party at a local hospital, ‘We had a rattling good time and the nurses were a jolly decent lot and thought the boys in blues [sic] were all heroes. They could not do enough for us. It got rather embarrassing. After a while they all wanted to go for a walk round the grounds. Yours truly played the game and admired the beauty of the evening but not letting myself in for anything.’59
Time, everyone knew, was short. Perhaps there was no time at all. It was the classic chat-up line of the military seducer. But it was affection, if possible love, that most pilots seemed to be looking for. Striking up any kind of relationship was difficult in a life of constant geographical shifts, a heavy weight of duty that kept you occupied for all the hours of daylight and which was punctuated by only brief and unpredictable periods of leave. Keeping in touch by telephone required serious dedication. Three-minute calls were all that wartime restrictions allowed and they could take hours to be put through. Robin Appleford and Rob Bodie were lucky. One night at the Tiger’s Head in Chislehurst they fell in with two wealthy civilians who had two young women, Christine and Pamela, in tow. By the end of the evening the women had switched allegiances and the four spent several happy weeks together, until the pilots were posted away.
An RAF uniform, a pilots’ wings, could be a passport to sex in the summer and autumn of 1940. Charles Fenwick went to the aid of a young woman who was being pestered by an army officer in the bar of a London hotel. The intervention led to drinks, lunch and a trip to the cinema. ‘As soon as we had settled down to watch a flick I put my arms around her shoulders…then before I can say Jack Robinson, she slips her hand under my raincoat and into my trousers nearly shooting me through the roof with surprise.’ Fenwick had already lost his virginity to a thirty-five-year-old woman married to a wealthy industrialist who lived in the north and left his wife to her own devices. She collected Fenwick from the Tangmere mess and drove him around the surrounding pubs, embarrassing him by leaving her Dutch cap on the bar while she rummaged in her handbag for cigarettes.60
The most obvious source of women was the WAAF. By the middle of the summer Waafs were to be found on most of the main fighter bases. The girls of the first war-time intakes were adventurous, reasonably educated by the standards of the time, anxious to show they could hold their own in a man’s world, yet also alive to the possibilities of romance. Edith Heap, a well-brought-up young woman from Nun Monkton in Yorkshire, arrived at Debden in the autumn of 1940 to work in the motor transport pool, driving Albion two-and-a-half-ton lorries and the tractors which laid out the flare paths to guide the pilots in at night. The women worked hard, their hours were long, and the airmens’ married quarters they lived in three to a billet were cold and damp. Both the RAF commanders and their own female officers imposed strict discipline, wary of the consequences of having young men and women in close proximity, and they did what they could to limit their social lives. The Waafs were only allowed off the base with permission and had to be back by 10.15 p.m.
It was impossible, of course, to keep the Waafs and airmen apart. Edith Heap and her friend Winifred Butler came across the pilots, mostly public-school boys of their own age, as they drove them around the base or ran them to the satellite station at Martlesham Heath. The friends were attractive, funny and independent-minded. Edith had her own car, a baby Jaguar, a classier motor than most pilots could afford, which she sometimes let them borrow for trips to London. The girls were popular and often taken out to dinner at the Red Lion at Duxford or the Rose and Crown at Bishop’s Stortford. They had two particular admirers, Jerrard Jefferies, tall, ‘quite knockout to look at’, with a silver streak in his dark hair, and Richard Whittaker. The relationships never had time to develop. ‘Jeff’ was posted as flight commander to a Czech unit, 310 Squadron at Duxford. Whittaker was killed over France.
One day Edith met Denis Wissler of 17 Squadron. He was eager, particularly boyish-looking, but perhaps slightly more sophisticated than most. On his first trip to France with 85 Squadron in May, he confided to his diary, he had visited a ‘place of doubtful virtue’ in Le Havre. But the impression shining from the diary’s pages is of an innocent young man, anxious to meet the right girl, fall in love, marry and live happily ever after. His and Edith’s first encounter was gauche. He playfully threw some sand at the tractor she was driving and the engine stopped. She offered him the crank handle and ordered him to start it again, which, sheepishly, he did.
Wissler’s months at Debden and Tangmere after his return from France were dominated by the desire to succeed as a fighter pilot and the search for a nice girl. His keenness was unquestionable. But he never seemed to be there when the squadron did well. ‘“A” Flight were over at Martlesham and shot down five machines,’ he wrote on 12 July. ‘What a party they had.’ He, though, was in ‘B’ flight, which did not get into the action. On the 28th he practised aerial gunnery shooting at a drogue. ‘The scores were awful,’ he recorded. ‘I failed to hit the thing at all.’ The following day he had better luck. ‘Up at 4.30 and forward to Martlesham Heath. I was with Flight Lieutenant Bayne and Flying Officer Bird-Wilson and after one uneventful patrol we met a Heinkel 111 which was being half-heartedly attacked by Spitfires. We made a head-on attack and then an astern attack, pieces and oil coming out in all directions. The E/A slowly went down to the water, I thought it was trying to get away low down and made another head-on attack. This time in [it] went into the water.’ He was credited with a share in the destruction of the Heinkel.
Many of the diary entries, though, fizz with mild dissatisfaction. On 9 August he broke his wireless transmitter and was fined ten shillings and later, while watching the daily inspection o
f his Hurricane, got himself covered in oil. He went to bed ‘in a damn bad temper…everything has gone wrong today’.61 His days were spent in long periods at readiness, followed by frustrating patrols and interceptions in which little or nothing happened. On the 20th the squadron moved briefly to Tangmere and at last he was deep in the action. On the 25th he was in ‘a hell of a scrap’ over Portland. He saw two Me 110s he had fired on going down, but the operations record book notes just one ‘probable’ and only gave him a share. When the squadron learned that it was to return to Debden at the start of September, it was rumoured this would precede a further move out of the firing line to Northern Ireland. ‘I hope not,’ he wrote.
The squadron stayed in East Anglia. One night his friend Birdy Bird-Wilson asked him to come out to dinner with a girl he knew and her friend. The girl was Winifred Butler. Bird-Wilson was keen on her but was already engaged, an arrangement that was stalled until his situation became less precarious. He thought Denis might take her mind off the loss of Richard Whittaker. The friend was Edith Heap. Both women had by now graduated from driving to the highly responsible work of plotting, shifting the indicators around the map table in the control room to show the progress of the raids and battles. As they drove away from the base for dinner in Bishop’s Stortford, Birdy sat in the front with Winifred, and Denis and Edith were in the back. ‘We got on like a house on fire and gradually the conversation became two tête-à-têtes,’ Edith remembered. Driving back, they heard a colossal bang, saw flames leaping up from some distant fields and went to investigate. In the excitement, Denis held Edith’s hand. They found a stable block ablaze where a departing night raider had jettisoned his bombs. The fire brigade was already there, so they resumed the journey to Debden. ‘That seemed to be that,’ Edith thought at the time. ‘Denis was taking out someone else. It had been a lovely dinner, he had been attentive and fun but not specially interested.’ The woman in question he had met not long before at a party in the sergeants’ mess. She was, he reported in his diary, ‘a sweet little Waaf called Margaret Cameron’. They had ‘quite a kissing session after the party was over’.
On the morning of Tuesday, 24 September, 17 Squadron was ordered south to intercept bombers approaching the Thames estuary. Their Hurricanes were still climbing when they saw the formation. As they closed on it, they were surprised to find a gaggle of Spitfires diving towards them, followed closely by a large number of Me 109s. Denis made one attack, broke it off, then climbed to make a second on a group of four Messerschmitts above him. Realizing he was about to stall, he levelled off. ‘There was a blinding flash on my port wing and I felt a hell of a blow on my left arm and then blood running down. I went into a hell of a dive and came back to Debden. A cannon shell hit my right wing and a bit of it had hit me just above the elbow and behind.’ Somehow he got the Hurricane down, but the shell had blown away most of the port flap and he was unable to stop, slewing off the runway into a pile of stones and cutting his face.
He was taken to Saffron Walden hospital. The following day he had visitors. Edith and Winifred came to see him. He was hungry and the girls went out to buy cakes and sandwiches. The following day he was released and spent the evening at ‘a hell of a party in the sergeants’ mess’. He also, as he recorded ruefully, ‘put up a hell of a black with Margaret [Cameron], as I rather deserted her for two other friends’. On Sunday, before going off on seven days’ sick leave, there was another bash in the sergeants’ mess. The pilots would arrive after dinner in the mess for the arrival of the band and the dancing would carry on until 10.30 when the Waafs had to leave. Denis was delighted to see his hospital visitor among them. ‘Met Edith Heap and fell in love with her at sight,’ he wrote before going to bed that night.
When he returned from visiting his parents in London there was yet another party, this time at the ‘B’ Flight dispersal hut to mark 17 Squadron’s imminent move to Martlesham. Edith and Winifred were there, with ‘Jeff’, who was visiting the base, in attendance. Denis, Edith wrote later, ‘just commandeered me. We danced and chatted all evening.’ In honour of the occasion the Waafs were allowed to stay until midnight. ‘Just as we had to go a rather stormy Jeff arrived in front of me, furious because I had not gone to find him. I told him it was up to him to do that, not me.’ Edith felt he was being unreasonable. He had not written while being at Duxford, and anyway had spent most of the evening dancing with Winifred. Edith didn’t care. ‘I was bowled over. Denis and I arranged to write each day and meet again as soon as our duties allowed it.’ Denis was now smitten. ‘My God it seems to be the real thing this time,’ ran the awestruck entry in his diary. ‘She is so sweet and seems to like me as much as I like her.’ It was ten days before they saw each other again. Edith managed to arrange a twenty-four-hour pass. They decided to spend the night at Cambridge. ‘We couldn’t get into the Garden House Hotel,’ she recalled. ‘Denis came back saying, “We can only have a double room and that’s not right, is it?” And I said, “No, it isn’t.”’ They found two rooms at the Red Lion at Trumpington.
During dinner he told her he had something to say to her. They went upstairs to her room. ‘He sat on the bed and I leaned against the dressing table. He just said, “Will you marry me?” And I said, “Yes.”’ Champagne was ordered. They drank it and went to their separate beds. The next day Denis insisted they drive to London to break the news to his family. His parents had moved to Dolphin Square, across the Thames from the Marmite factory which ‘Pop’ Wissler ran. On the way they stopped off in Cambridge to order an engagement ring. Edith telephoned the base to plead for an extension to her leave, which was granted as long as she was back for duty the following day. Denis rang ahead to Dolphin Square to say he was bringing a friend. When they arrived, Edith ‘got ever so apprehensive. I think he did as well. On the way down the corridor to the flat he held my hand. I was in a blue funk by this time.’62 Denis had said nothing in letters and calls home about Edith and was worried in his diary about keeping them in the dark. ‘I don’t want to hurt them,’ he wrote, ‘for I love them so.’ There was no cause for concern. ‘Denis shot me into the bathroom while he told them the news. I just stood there shaking in my shoes. A yell from the sitting room and I emerged to be hugged and kissed. I belonged to the family from that minute.’ There were drinks, then dinner. Despite a bombing raid, everyone ‘laughed all through dinner till we ached, completely ignoring all the banging and crashing going on outside’.
Edith took him to Yorkshire to meet her family. Then they spent another forty-eight-hour leave together at Dolphin Square, planning the wedding, set for 4 January, the date of the Wisslers’ own anniversary. Denis had been anxious to get married as quickly as possible, and was delighted that she had already applied to leave the WAAF as the regulations demanded. ‘Oh my darling it is grand you putting in your discharge now,’ he wrote. ‘We might speed up getting married a little if you say the word, but it all rests with you, my sweet. I wonder what you bought yourself while you were in Cambridge. I am living for the time I shall find out. Oh darling, I do miss you so, I do so love to be with you. Oh, I need you by me, I love you so, so much.’63
Three days after he returned from London, on the morning of 11 November, Denis landed at Martlesham Heath from an uneventful patrol over a convoy. Towards noon the squadron was scrambled again to intercept sixty dive bombers apparently heading for the same ships. Denis was in Blue Section. Edith and Winifred were at work in the control room, which had been moved to Saffron Walden after the summer blitzes of Debden. The 17 Squadron Hurricanes were vectored on to a plot that would bring them into contact with the Germans over Burnham in Essex. Edith tracked the fighters, Winifred the raiders. ‘We could hear everything that was going on and all the battle that took place,’ Edith said. Over the tannoy came a voice yelling that Blue Four was going down into the sea. ‘I knew who that was. It was Denis. I didn’t say anything. I just sat there because we had finished our work. They were coming back.’ She went off duty but was unable to e
at lunch, still forcing herself to hope it wasn’t true. She tried to stifle her fears by going to the motor depot to talk to her old colleagues. ‘When I got back to Saffron, Bill [her former superior] was waiting for me…Yes it was true, he was missing. No parachute.’
The following day she went to break the news to the Wisslers. Pop Wissler’s grief was savage and shocking. A little later she was invited to lunch at Martlesham and to pick up Denis’s belongings. His body had not been found. He had apparently been shot down by Me 109s while flying into the bombers, after the order to break off the attack had been given. Three days before, while on leave, he made his last diary entry. Once again he had been absent during a day when the squadron had done well. ‘Each of the blokes got at least one,’ he wrote. ‘Total score fifteen destroyed and some probable. Oh God, fancy missing a party like that.’
16
‘The Day Had Been a Year’
Saturday, 7 September, like all the preceding days of the month, was sunny, cloudless and hot. It was perfect bombing weather. In the early morning the Germans flew the usual reconnaissance missions to note the damage from the raids of the day and night before. Fighter Command braced itself for the first wave of what was expected to be another series of attacks on the bases. But no bombers came. For six hours the radar screens remained blank. Out at dispersal the pilots wondered at the inactivity, then gratefully took the opportunity to doze in the glowing sunshine. It could not last. Dowding and Park listened to the silence with foreboding. Clearly something ominous was brewing. At 3.54 p.m. the spell was broken. The first report came in that aircraft were forming up over the Pas de Calais. On the cliffs below, Hermann Goering, dressed operatically in a powder-blue uniform clustered over with gold braid, looked up at his aeroplanes. His dissatisfaction with the performance of his commanders and crews had driven him to take personal charge of the last phase of the air attack before the invasion of Britain was launched. The first formation of bombers swept overhead, nursed by an escort of Messerschmitts. It was followed almost immediately by another; then another. In his headquarters, Dowding looked at the counters crowding the table map and guessed that every aircraft the Luftwaffe could muster was heading for Britain’s shores.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 40