Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945

by Patrick Bishop

  A graphic account of the experience and the psychological aftermath, written for the psychologists who were by now being used to study aircrew personnel, was given by a pilot who had been shot down and seriously wounded after taking part in fifty sweeps.

  On September 17, 1941, after getting separated from the wing during a spot of confusion near Lille, I began returning home alone at 18,000 feet, weaving hard and losing height gradually to keep my speed up. Over St Omer, two Me 109Fs passed 1,000 feet above me and slightly to the left, going the opposite way. I was then at 13,000 feet. I climbed into the sun, intending to beat these two up as soon as I was alone, but I soon ascertained just the opposite and immediately became the centre of a large gaggle, consisting of nine or ten MEs and one Spitfire. I don’t remember feeling frightened, only highly interested and thoroughly keyed up…I took a lot of evasive action and the Huns did a lot of inaccurate shooting, till it began to look as though I could float about all afternoon without being hit.

  Then, as he neared the French coast,

  there was a terrific bang inside the cockpit and something feeling like a steam hammer hit me on the back of the head and knocked me for six. I don’t think I was ever quite unconscious, or if I was it was only for a few seconds, but complete darkness descended and I hadn’t the energy to move a finger. I felt myself fading away, as though going under an anaesthetic. There was nothing left but pitch-darkness and a pain behind my right ear. But a tiny corner of my mind, aloof from everything else, still seemed to be functioning, and I remember thinking detachedly in the dark: ‘So, after all it’s happened to me too…it’s come to you who always told yourself there’s a way out of every scrape. But there’s no way out of this one, buddy, because you are quite blind and you haven’t the strength to move a muscle and you are diving down towards the sea with a lot of 109s which are ready to polish you off as soon as you show any signs of revival.

  ‘So there! I wish I could have had a word with the chaps, just to explain how it happened, instead of simply vanishing like so many others. And there are a lot of people I’d like to say goodbye to…And you’re a clown to be shot down by a bloody Hun anyway. But it’s too late for regrets now. It can only be a few seconds now…just one almighty holocaust as we hit the sea; then no more fighting, no more fear, no more pain in [the] back of the head. Just peace…God, how marvellous!’

  At the last second he pulled out of the dive, shook off his pursuers and made a good landing at Hawkinge, despite a terrible head wound and the loss of one and a half pints of blood.

  Convalescing in the Palace Hotel, Torquay, he was told that he would not be able to fly for three months.

  ‘I pretended to be alarmed but was secretly very glad. For a couple of weeks I slept no more than an hour at a time. When I did there were awful dreams such as being towed around the sky by my foot…After I had been on leave for a couple of weeks, I settled down, slept most of the night and ate fairly well. The kindness of my wife and the loveliness of my little boy took things off – made me forget for quite long periods. Then the sleeplessness and the dreams came back and while reading I would suddenly see myself having to bale out of an aircraft. I shivered with fright.’

  After a particularly harrowing night he reported his dreams to a doctor. He was referred to a wing commander who reassured him he would not have to go back to flying for several months.

  ‘I felt better for a day or two. Then it returned. I began to think perhaps I should have to go on bombers and stick it out for eight or more hours. Rather than that I will go back to my night fighters now where we seldom do more than a 3-hour stretch. Supposing I was petrified with fear and could not fire a gun or read my special equipment instruments, I should be letting my CO, my squadron, and my country down, and again if I did not go back to my job I am letting them all down and myself by being a coward.’7

  Many of the moral and material advantages the British pilots had enjoyed the previous summer had disappeared. They were no longer flying over friendly fields and beaches within reach of rescuers, but ranging with limited fuel into hostile territory where the Germans’ increasingly efficient radar system gave plenty of warning of their approach. It was up to them whether or not they took the bait. Frequently they chose not to and preserved their resources. The enemy then became the light flak guns, which accounted for a large number of casualties. From late September onwards, the German pilots became more aggressive with the arrival into service of the new Focke-Wulf 190s, which, it quickly became clear, had the edge over the improved Spitfire Vs.

  The sky over northern France was a very dangerous place. It was the Fighter Boys’ turn to experience the desolation of the journey home on drying tanks, the wind thrumming in shrapnel holes and the cold and empty sea below. Baling out unharmed over land during the defence of Britain usually meant an unpleasant shock, rescue with a cup of tea or a shot of whisky, transport back to base and the joyful greetings of friends. Now it signalled the end of the line: imprisonment until the war was over. The apprehension mounted as the French coast approached and the leader’s voice crackling over the R/T announced the start of the ordeal with the words: ‘Corks in, boys!’

  Some were pleased with the opportunity to go onto the attack. Douglas Bader had had a frustrating time during the summer of 1940 and took to the ‘sweeps’ with impatient energy. In March 1941, he was posted to Tangmere to command a wing of three Spitfire squadrons. With his arrival the pace of activity rose sharply. By mid June his pilots went to France almost every day, except when the weather was bad, flying up to three sweeps. Bader’s difficult personality was redeemed by a gift for leadership. The shift from defence to offence might have been expected to weaken morale and motivation, but Bader created in his wing a spirit of cheerful aggression and dedication. Cocky Dundas, a perceptive and humane observer, was seduced by the mercurial, unconventional ‘DB’.

  ‘There was a close bond between the three Spitfire units at Tangmere that summer,’ he wrote. ‘Bader welded the wing into a single unit and we all knew each other well, so that the losses sustained by the other squadrons were almost as painful as our own.’ And the losses were heavy. Between 20 June and 10 August, Dundas’s squadron, 616, lost twelve pilots, more than half its establishment. Dundas found that, unlike the previous August, when a spate of casualties dented the squadron spirit, ‘morale was sky high’.8

  Dundas found Tangmere in the high summer of 1941 an enchanted place where fear of death heightened the intensity of his joy at living. His memory was of ‘sharp contrasts; of the pleasure of being alive and with friends in the gentle Sussex summer evenings; of visits from Diana, when we would dine and dance in Brighton, or sit long on the balcony outside the Old Ship Club at Bosham watching the moon on the water and listening to the tide lapping against the wall beneath us and memories of tearing terror when, at the end of a dogfight, I found myself alone with fifty miles of hostile sky between me and the Channel coast and the hungry 109s curving in to pick off the straggler’.

  The era came to an end with Bader’s fall. He was shot down in a dogfight with 109s between Boulogne and Le Touquet early in August and taken prisoner. When Dundas returned from leave after Bader’s capture, he was dejected at the thought of the endless fighting that lay ahead. ‘I knew in my heart that I had little enthusiasm for the prospect,’ he wrote later. It took an enormous effort of will to keep going.

  There was no disguising the changed nature of the struggle. Dennis Armitage, who arrived at Tangmere later in the summer, felt that it ‘wasn’t like fighting a battle on your home ground. It seemed to us very pointless…it was a political, psychological exercise so that the French could see British aircraft overhead. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enter into the spirit of it in the same way as I had at the Battle of Britain.’9 Armitage was shot down on 21 September while trying to keep the formation he was leading on bomber escort duty together. He was hit by an incendiary round, which set his tank and his oxygen supply on fire, but he somehow managed to b
ale out. The Germans were waiting for him when he landed and ‘horribly cocky’. As they stepped forward to arrest him they announced, without apparent irony, that for him the war was over.

  And so it was, for Armitage, for Bader and for many others, among them some of the outstanding pilots of the previous summer. Bob Tuck was shot down in January 1942, not by fighters but by flak outside Boulogne during a Rhubarb, and spent the next three years in prison before he escaped and after a dreadful journey reached the Russian lines. Paddy Barthropp had only been back on operations for two days after a six-month spell instructing when he was shot down near St-Omer, baled out and was captured.

  At least they were alive. Hundreds who survived the Battle of Britain were to die in Circuses and Rhubarbs. Paddy Finucane lasted until July 1942. Like Tuck he was brought down by ground fire. On the way back from shooting up shipping and a German airfield, the wing he was leading passed over the beach at Pointe du Touquet. Pilot Officer F. Aikman, who was flying as his number two, described how, as they flew over the beach, he saw a small machine-gun post perched on a ridge of sand. ‘We were almost on the post before Paddy realized it was there and the soldiers opened up at point blank range.’10 The radiator of Finucane’s Spitfire was hit and he prepared to bale out. He was too low. The engine stopped. He knew what was coming. His last words over the R/T before he hit the sea in a curtain of spray were: ‘This is it, chaps.’

  Others were killed in the new theatres opening up, in the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Far East. Noel Agazarian volunteered for duty in the Middle East and was shot down in his Spitfire over the Libyan desert in May 1941. The life of the man his family loved as ‘Le Roi Soleil’ was snuffed out. His sister, Yvonne, was devastated. ‘But I didn’t cry,’ she said later. ‘It wasn’t done.’11

  Death seemed very much closer now. The folklore of the mess taught that acceptance was often the precursor to the chop. ‘If one once doubted that one was going to survive then the way downhill was pretty quick,’ said Denys Gillam.12 The fatalism was cumulative. After his first tour flying offensive operations, Al Deere was ‘always confident that I would come through all right’. On his second one, ‘although it was far less hectic, there was always uppermost in my mind the thought that I would be killed’.13 Pete Brothers, later in the war, ‘reached the stage where I thought there was no question of surviving. It was either going to happen today or it was going to happen tomorrow.’14

  Yet, despite the ever-shortening odds, the compulsion to ‘go back on ops’ repeatedly dragged men who had demonstrably done their bit away from safe and comfortable desk jobs and instructing posts and back into the realm of danger. Richard Barclay, the earnest Cambridge economics graduate who kept a diary during the late summer of 1940, was shot down at the end of November that year. He was wounded in his legs, ankle and elbows and spent two months in hospital. There was a brief spell as an instructor before he was back in action with 611 Squadron. During a sweep over St-Omer he was attacked by Me 109s and forced to land. He escaped and met up with local resisters, who passed him down the line to the Pyrénées. Once in Spain, he presented himself at the British Embassy and made his way back to Britain via Gibraltar after an eleven-week odyssey. He was given a cushy headquarters job, but was soon agitating to be back in action. At the beginning of July 1942 he was in Egypt commanding 238 Squadron. On the evening of 17 July he was dead, shot down while patrolling in the Alamein area.

  Many of those who died and those who expected to die were already embarking on the next phase of their lives. Paddy Finucane had just got engaged before his death to Miss Jean Woolford, a typist at the Ministry of Agriculture. Al Deere’s anxiety to get back into the fighting was mixed with tender thoughts about his fiancée, Joan. Richard Barclay, whose diary is interspersed with wistful speculations about how he would be enjoying the perfect autumn days if he was not waiting at dispersal, knew what he was missing. But they went on. ‘You didn’t stop because you were tired or you didn’t like it,’ said Denys Gillam afterwards. ‘You just kept going.’15

  By the time the end came the Fighter Boys had long since split up. Those who survived were scattered throughout the now sprawling RAF empire. The others were dead, lying in English country churchyards and sun-baked military cemeteries, buried in estuary mud or North Sea strands or long dissolved in the Channel tides. Of the 2,917 men who fought in Fighter Command the air battles of the summer of 1940, 544 were killed. Another 795 died before the war was over. On 15 August 1945, those who were left were able to believe for the first time that they might live the natural span of a man. Few had any idea of what awaited them as they stepped out into the mysterious world of the normal. But all knew they could never forget what they had left behind.

  Epilogue: The Last Note

  On 17 September 2000, a chilly Sunday morning tinged with intimations of death and winter, hundreds of guests filed through the west door of Westminster Abbey for a service of thanksgiving to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. The rows of hard, narrow chairs were packed with RAF members of all ages and ranks accompanied by their wives, sons and daughters.

  After the readings the congregation rose. As the scraping of wood on stone and the coughing died away a towering silence settled over the abbey. Then the Central Band of the Royal Air Force struck up the opening notes of the Battle of Britain March and down the aisle, moving with slow dignity, came eight white-haired men bearing the Roll of Honour inscribed with the names of the airmen who died in the summer of 1940.1 Pete Brothers lead the procession alongside Christopher Foxley-Norris, with Paddy Barthropp and Tom Neil among those following behind. They were escorted by a phalanx of junior officers, slim and upright, a reminder of the men the survivors had once been. When the service was over, the crowd stood for a while outside, greeting friends, lighting cigarettes, making plans for lunch or preparations for the journey home. A familiar noise cut through the hubbub and all heads tilted upwards. A Spitfire slid out of the low, greyish murk, hung for a few seconds overhead, then disappeared back into the cloud.

  At the time about 300 veterans of the fighting were still alive. Two years later the number had fallen to 231. There was a feeling that the service marked the last occasion when the event being commemorated would remain moored to the recent past. Soon death and time would loosen the bonds of memory and it would slip into the realm of history.

  The Fighter Boys had already passed into legend. Churchill had created it before the fighting had even properly begun and reinforced it before the outcome was known. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was his invention. Long before its outcome was decided, the men fighting it had been eulogized as ‘The Few’. Despite the power of the rhetoric, the pilots seem to have been only half-aware that they were involved in a historic struggle. It was only when it was over that they began to discern the epic dimensions of the event they had been engaged in.

  For most of the pilots the battle had a deep personal significance. For some it was the most important experience of their life, shaping for good or bad everything that came afterwards. For all of them, their participation was a badge of honour that they would wear until they died, arousing an admiration, respect and gratitude that took precedence over all subsequent achievement.

  The great question of what to do when it was all over was perhaps harder to confront for the Fighter Boys than for any other serviceman. Staying on in the RAF gave the opportunity to carry on flying and to remain in a familiar world, even if it had become more petty and mundane. Many chose to continue. Dutiful, conscientious Al Deere carried on for another twenty-two years, ending up as commandant of the apprentice school at Halton, and retiring to live nearby until his death in 1995. Christopher Foxley-Norris finished with the rank of air chief marshal and a knighthood. Birdy Bird-Wilson became an air vice-marshal. Dennis David had a long and satisfying career and was air attache in Prague during the Soviet crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. Pete Brothers joined the Colonial Service and went to Kenya, but after
a few years reapplied to the RAF, commanded a bomber squadron during the Malayan emergency and ended his distinguished service as an air commodore. Billy Drake held a number of staff appointments, retiring as a group captain in 1963 and starting a new life as a restauranteur and property developer in Portugal.

  But there would never be another summer of 1940. It was a truth that the routines of peace-time service underlined. Sailor Malan went to staff college for a year, then decided, in the words of his biographer, that the ‘air no longer held out anything that would retain his interest and enthusiasm…He saw the magnificent combative spirit of the Air Force turn flaccid now the challenge was gone.’2 He returned to South Africa with his wife and two children to work for the Anglo-American mining heir, Harry Oppenheimer, bought a huge farm and plunged briefly into politics, defending the constitution against Afrikaner extremists. Before he left England he made a last trip to the White Hart to unveil a memorial in the bar parlour, a blackout blind that had been signed in chalk, over the years, by many of the pilots who had passed through the inn door. A replica is there still. Malan died young, aged fifty-two, in 1963, brought down at last by Parkinson’s disease. Michael Crossley also ended up in South Africa, where he grew tobacco before his death in 1987. So did Robin Appleford, before moving on to Rhodesia and Kenya, where he worked for a British company for fifteen years before returning to Britain. His friend Rob Bodie was killed in a flying accident in February 1942.