Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  Vigors felt something he had never felt before.

  A wave of misery swept over me. Up till now I had been able to shrug off the deaths of even my close friends. But this was different. Hilary had been like my brother for the past nine months. We had pooled all our hopes, thoughts and fears and had somehow managed to support each other through the trauma of those times. Now he was gone. I just couldn’t get my mind to accept it. I called Snipe and together we walked off down the airfield. I tried to explain what had happened, but he just wagged his tail and didn’t seem to understand. Then something occurred which had not happened in years. I started to cry. Snipe realized there was something wrong. I sat down on the grass and he nuzzled up to me. I pulled myself together and suddenly a different emotion took hold of me, an emotion which I had not experienced before in my life. Cold, impossible to control, hatred.13

  The Fighter Boys had grown up. The days were cooler and darker now. The fabulous summer flickered and died. Lightness of heart was harder to sustain. At Biggin Hill, 92 Squadron fought hard and then drank, joked and flirted at the White Hart or in their improvised nightclub at Southwood Manor. But there was melancholy behind the laughter. At the end of October, Pilot Officer Roy Mottram sent a letter to Bunty Nash, a much-loved Waaf officer known by the squadron from its time at Pembrey, with news of her friends. The old gang were going; dead, wounded or posted away.

  92 has a number of strange faces these days [he wrote]. One or two of them are real good types well up to standard! Bill Watling rejoined us a couple of days ago and everybody was pleased to meet him again. He seems little the worse for his experience, but has rather an ersatz healthy look about his face – the result of his burns – but that will vanish with time. He is simply itching to be back and wipe off the ‘black’ as he calls it, and I feel sorry for the next Hun he has in his sights. Alan is on sick leave at the moment…Brian is going on famously, but the powers that be want to move him to Halton and he definitely objects in no small manner. X has been having a pretty rotten time of it and his nerves have been in a pretty shattering state for some time. He came back today from seven days’ leave and I hope he is much better. He took to the bottle in no small degree and quickly earned the nom-de-plume ‘Boy Drunkard’. That is one of the little things that war does and is quite beyond the ken of the average layman who fondly believes the Fighter Boys can stand anything without it showing.14

  Bill Watling was killed four months later. Mottram survived until the following August, when he was shot down over France. The Boy Drunkard sobered up and survived the war.

  The strain was continuous, the German attacks relentless. But now they lacked purpose or meaning. The daylight raids could never change the course of the war. The nightly blitz caused grief, misery and discomfort, but never the ‘mass psychosis and emigration’ the Germans desired. ‘Operation Sealion’ remained technically alive, but the autumn gales waiting to sweep the Channel made its implementation unlikely, at least until the New Year. On 12 October, Field-Marshal Keitel, the head of the OKW, informed the Wehrmacht that the plan would remain in effect only as a means of exerting political and military pressure on Britain, though its execution would remain as a possibility for the spring or early summer. The great battle faded. Its actual end was never clearly discernible to the pilots. On 31 October, though, it seemed that some climacteric had been passed. For the first time since anyone could remember, neither side lost a man or an aeroplane in battle.

  18

  Rhubarbs and Circuses

  The glorious summer died and autumn faded into winter. Fighter Command changed with the seasons. There were new faces at the top. On 25 November, as soon as it was safe to do so, Dowding was removed and the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Sholto Douglas, put in to replace him. At the same time, Keith Park was shifted from 11 Group to make way for Trafford Leigh-Mallory, his old antagonist and a man he detested. The departures were expected, yet the pilots felt unhappy at the speed with which Dowding and Park were sent on their way. They were a distant, unconvivial pair, but their dedication and decency, and the intelligence of their handling of the summer fighting, had won them the admiration, even affection, of those they sent into battle. The official explanation was that they were tired and the circumstances of the war had altered. Dowding went off on a mission to the United States. Park was given a training command. Most in 11 Group felt that the two were the victims of jealousy and intrigue. It seemed to Al Deere that they had ‘won the Battle of Britain but lost the battle of words that followed, with the result that they…were cast aside in their finest hour’.1

  It was true, though, that the air war had taken a different turn. From the end of the year, as Luftwaffe daytime activity fell away, Fighter Command increasingly took the offensive. The roles were gradually reversed. Now it was British fighters escorting bombers to strike German targets in northern France, or wheeling provocatively over the Luftwaffe bases, trying to tempt the Messerschmitts up to fight in the RAF’s adaptation of Jagdgeschwader free-hunt tactics.

  The squadrons had also changed. Many now contained only a handful of the original members who had been there when the serious fighting started. Of the twenty-two pilots who had been with 32 Squadron when it celebrated at the White Hart in Brasted on 15 August, only four, including Michael Crossley, remained at the end of the year. In between, at least a dozen had been posted away. Six had been badly wounded. Another six had been killed. When Al Deere’s squadron, 54, was finally moved out of the line, only four of the pilots who first went into battle were left. Its character was modified further when the unit was designated as category ‘C’. Its more experienced members were sent off to stiffen front-line units and Deere was given the job of training up novices.

  The few were becoming many. The pilot shortage was solved. Young men were pouring out of the operational training units. At the beginning of July there had been forty-four Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons in Fighter Command. By the end of 1940 there were a total of seventy-one squadrons, with a secure supply of ever-improving aircraft. Many of the newcomers, as the months passed, came from abroad. During 1941, 609 Squadron had pilots from Belgium, France, Poland, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Rhodesia pass through its ranks. The most cosmopolitan squadrons distilled a new spirit from the mix of nationalities and it was noted that they were often the most happy and successful. But it was clear that the old intimacy was cooling.

  With the slackening of the crisis, military discipline, eroded by the frantic conditions of the summer, began to be reasserted. No. 92 Squadron was only a year old, but in its brief life it had cultivated an air of separateness and indifference to the rules that had been tolerated or overlooked because of its great success in destroying German aircraft. Its self-absorption had been reinforced during September and October by heavy losses that bound the survivors together, darkened their mood and increased their resentment of outsiders.

  During much of the heavy fighting, the squadron had operated without an effective permanent commanding officer. Squadron Leader Phillip Sanders, who had led the squadron from the relative quiet of Pembrey into the heat of Biggin Hill at the beginning of September, set himself on fire lighting a cigarette after returning, soaked in petrol, from a sortie on the 15th. He was succeeded by Robert Lister, a Cranwell graduate and pre-war career officer, who had spent most of the war encased in plaster after a flying accident. Shortly after taking over he was shot down, badly wounded and declared unfit for flying. Instead of choosing a successor from the squadron’s veteran pilots, the authorities defied the lessons of the summer and inexplicably went for a relatively elderly and inexperienced outsider, Alan MacLachlan, who had been commissioned into the reserve in 1930. He lasted a week before being shot down and wounded and Brian Kingcome became the de facto squadron commander. The recommendation was finally made that he should take over. Before it could be implemented, Kingcome, too, was out of action, after being wounded and forced to bale out on 15 October.

  Eleven d
ays later a new commanding officer arrived at Biggin Hill. Johnny Kent was a Canadian, an outstanding pilot who had gained his licence at sixteen and been an RAF test pilot in the pre-war years. It had been hair-raising work. On 300 occasions he was required to fly into barrage-balloon cables to calculate the damage they did to aircraft and try out devices for cutting through them. He came from a Polish squadron, No. 303, where he had been a flight commander, helping in a short time to turn it into one of the most effective units in Fighter Command.

  Kent reached Biggin Hill at tea time, and the mess sergeant pointed out the officers of his new squadron, sitting together at one table. He joined them without telling them who he was. ‘My first impressions,’ he wrote later, ‘were not favourable and their general attitude and lack of manners indicated a lack of control and discipline. I realized I was going to have my hands full.’2

  Kent was astute enough to understand there were reasons for the pilots’ truculence. Despite their impressive performance, they had suffered shocking casualties and were ‘disorganized, undisciplined and demoralized’. There was a move to post the squadron north for a rest, which he resisted, arguing that if this was done it would be finished as a fighting force. Instead, he ‘begged to be allowed to keep it at Biggin as that would give me the chance I needed to get it into shape – while the stigma of having “had it” could not be attached to it’.

  A few days after he took over and was leading the squadron on patrol, they encountered high-flying Me 109s, but several pilots, instead of turning to face them, broke formation and headed for home. It was a case, Kent concluded, of ‘109-itis’. On landing he threatened to shoot down the pilots himself if there was a repetition. A few weeks later, a weaver failed to break up a formation of German fighters attacking the squadron from the rear. This provoked another tirade. The senior NCOs were summoned and accused of being slipshod and insubordinate. There were some words of praise for the pilots’ record in the air, but then he moved on to attack their conceit, indiscipline, drinking habits and clothes. The parties at Southwood House would have to be scaled down and women guests out by 11 p.m. Check shirts, old school ties, suede shoes and pink pyjamas worn under tunics would no longer be tolerated. The theft of aviation petrol to fuel their uninsured, unlicenced cars was to stop.

  Kent reckoned later that ‘this action made me even more unpopular and I am sure many dire threats were made behind my back, but nothing came of them and gradually it began to dawn on them all that the squadron had become more efficient and that perhaps my tirade had not been delivered simply because I was an unpleasant bastard but because I had done it for their own good’. He appealed to Tony Bartley to help him win the squadron’s cooperation. Bartley agreed. Kent’s success in the air and willingness to join in the fun at the White Hart hastened the process of reconciliation, and by the time he was posted away six months later to command a training unit, he was held in great affection by most of the pilots.

  It was clear, though, that the days of informality were over and the grip of convention was tightening on the Fighter Boys. From the outside it seemed that little had changed. Propagandists continued to present the pilots in the light-hearted image they had created for themselves. Biggin Hill became a centre for media visitors. Sailor Malan, Al Deere and Bob Tuck became celebrities. The BBC leant heavily on fighter pilots to make broadcasts harking back to the great events of the summer. The scripts were mostly written for them by Ministry of Information apparatchiks, in a Hollywood-tinged style that sounded strange when spoken in the clipped line-by-line delivery the novice broadcasters invariably used. A typical ‘talk’ was made in December 1940 by James Nicolson of 249 Squadron, describing the action in August in which he won Fighter Command’s only Victoria Cross of the war. Speaking in a public-school accent, he described how he chased after his quarry, ‘shouting out loud at him when I first saw him, “I’ll teach you some manners you Hun!”’ The form was to regard broadcasts as a ‘line shoot’. Any embarrassment was offset by a fee, from which the Air Ministry insisted on taking its cut.

  The old reluctance to promote ‘aces’ had gone. Certain pilots were pushed towards the newspapers. Paddy Finucane, the good-looking, slightly gauche Irishman who, once the duffer of his training intake, had gone on to become one of Fighter Command’s most successful pilots, became a favourite. His crinkly hair, square jaw and faraway look made him a favourite with women readers. Recovering in hospital after accidentally breaking an ankle while jumping over a wall in the blackout in the autumn of 1941, he was inundated with get-well letters. ‘I guess you’ve received tons of fan mail from hero-worshipping dames all over the country,’ wrote a land girl who gave her address as ‘Amongst the turnips, Wiltshire’. She signed off, ‘Boy, don’t I wish I’d been a nurse.’ Another from ‘an admirer’, Miss Rose Layton of Heathstan Road, Shepherd’s Bush, began: ‘Dear Paddy, I read of your accident in the Daily Herald and I am very sorry and hope you will get well again soon [as] I know how anxious you must be to get up there again. They can’t keep a good man down. Don’t think this silly of me Paddy but I would like you to carry or wear this horseshoe I am sending you for luck.’3

  The zenith of the Fighter Boys’ fame coincided with a relative decline in their military importance. Heavy raids by the Luftwaffe in daylight virtually stopped. Instead there were fighter-bomber raids and a continuation of the night offensive. This lasted through the winter, killing 18,000 civilians in the first four months of the new year. Some pilots were diverted to flying night fighters, which slowly became more effective as the radar needed to locate the raiders improved.

  Having fought off the Luftwaffe and ensured its own survival, Fighter Command took on a secondary role. From the end of 1940 it served as an adjunct to the British bomber offensive being launched against German targets in northern France. The pilots went from attacking bombers to defending them. They were required to fit into complex tactical arrangements designed to shield Bomber Command aircraft on their way to their targets, to cover them while they did their work and to hold off attackers as they headed home. The missions were called ‘Circuses’ and could involve a hundred or more fighters, organized into wings, escorting small numbers of bombers. Many pilots realized from the outset that the importance of these operations was slight. They were aimed at appropriate targets: marshalling yards, workshops, refineries and the like. But the number of bombers involved and the loads they delivered meant that the effort was disproportionate to any results. The real purpose was to use the bombers as bait to entice the German fighters into the air with the aim of destroying as many as possible.

  As well as the escort duties, the pilots were tasked to fly ‘Rhubarbs’, low-level attacks against targets of opportunity such as bridges, locomotives, convoys, flak batteries and barges. Sometimes they were ordered off on anti-fighter sweeps, with the hazy instruction from Leigh-Mallory to ‘seek and destroy the enemy’. Some of the inspiration for the offensive had come from Trenchard, still a brooding presence. Before taking over Fighter Command, Sholto Douglas had been informed of the old man’s view that the time had come to ‘lean towards France’4 with aggressive sallies over the enemy lines like those flown by the RFC above the Western Front.

  Both Douglas and Leigh-Mallory had served with the RFC in the First World War and were disposed to listen. Douglas wondered at first whether the likely casualties would justify the results. Leigh-Mallory was persuaded from the outset. Thus began a phase of fighting which killed hundreds of pilots for negligible results. Between November 1940 and the end of 1941, nearly 470 pilots who had survived the Battle of Britain were killed. The campaign got off to a poor start with even the official arithmetic weighing in the Germans’ favour. Between January and June 1941, there were 2,700 sorties by fighters, during which fifty-one pilots were lost. Only forty-four German aircraft were claimed destroyed. Inevitably, the real figure was lower, probably about twenty.

  The initiative might have fizzled out had it not been for the German attack on t
he Soviet Union in June. The Circuses and Rhubarbs gained a new ostensible purpose: to force the Luftwaffe to pull back assets from the Eastern Front, or at least to make life in northern France so difficult as to prevent a transfer of the men and aircraft stationed there. The offensive was stepped up. This time the balance seemed more acceptable. Fighter Command claimed to have shot down 731 German aeroplanes while losing 411 itself. The true score was 154 including 51 losses unconnected with British action. ‘The combat balance sheet would thus appear to be about four to one in Germany’s favour,’ judged John Terraine, in his classic history of the RAF in the European war.5 Nor could the Russians be said to have benefited. The activity persuaded the Luftwaffe to keep a force of fighters in France and the Low Countries. But it consisted at any time of about 260 single-engined aircraft which would have had little effect on the fortunes of the war in the East.

  For many veterans of the summer fighting of 1940, flying Circuses and Rhubarbs was more nerve-racking than anything they had experienced during the Battle of Britain. Flying close escort to the bombers meant crawling along at their speed, rocking in the shock waves from the exploding flak and waiting to be pounced on by the German fighters. Now the British pilots were experiencing the same dread that their Luftwaffe counterparts had felt the year previously. To Paddy Finucane, close escort duty was ‘murder’. The Rhubarbs were less feared, but were still regarded with apprehension. Al Deere later described them as ‘useless and hated’. At best they ‘served only as a means of letting off steam in that [they] enabled pilots to fire their guns in anger, more often than not against some unidentified target’. Deere confessed that on the few Rhubarbs in which he was engaged he could not ‘truthfully say that the vehicles and the train which I attacked were strictly military targets’.6