Some found jobs in civil aviation. Paul Richey was European area manager for BP, then took up an offer from his old Fighter Command comrade Max Aitken to work as air correspondent on the family-owned Daily Express. He continued to live an adventurous life. He climbed mountains, sailed racing yachts and went deep-sea diving with Jacques Cousteau. To add to the broad row of decorations, there was a medal from the Royal Humane Society, awarded after he dived in to rescue a woman drowning in heavy seas off the Ligurian coast at Portofino. He was working on a definitive history of Anglo-French relations when he died in 1989. Hugh Dundas also joined Beaverbrook Newspapers and moved into television in the 1960s, ending up as chairman of Thames Television. He was knighted in 1987 and died in 1995.
Tim Vigors, after an extraordinary series of narrow escapes, survived the war. In peacetime he pursued the loves of his life, going into the bloodstock industry and breeding some notable champions and founding his own aviation company. Douglas Bader left the RAF in 1946 to work for Shell who awarded him his own aeroplane. The appearance of Paul Brickhill’s biography, Reach for the Sky, which was turned into a film, established him as a post-war celebrity. He enjoyed his fame and made some good use of it, encouraging disabled people to believe that they could lead, as he had done, not a normal but an exceptional life. He died in September 1982 on his way back from a dinner in honour of Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris.
Roland Beamont became a test pilot, then an aviation executive. Tony Bartley also started a peacetime career as a test pilot before following his wife, the actress Deborah Kerr, to Hollywood. He had met her at a film studio in 1941. She was starring in a costume drama. He was doing the flying stunts for The First of the Few, which told the story of the Spitfire’s inventor, R.J. Mitchell. They married in 1947. Dowding, by now a peer, was among the guests. He alarmed Bartley’s father during the service by asking him if he could feel, as he could, the presence of his son’s dead comrades. The marriage lasted until 1959, by which time Bartley had launched into a career in television. He died at his home in Ireland in April 2001.
Brian Kingcome found the transition to peacetime service difficult. He tried several times to resign his commission, but was told that, as an ex-Cranwell cadet, he owed it to his country to stay on. In September 1950 he contracted tuberculosis, which he blamed on a bachelor lifestyle of steady drinking, late nights and irregular meals. He spent three years in a sanatorium. On leave, in a bar, deciding what to do next, he ran into an American acquaintance who worked for Twentieth Century-Fox. The man asked Kingcome to be his assistant on the film he was working on. Kingcome resigned his commission the same day. Later he tried to get a management job in industry but was disappointed by what he found. His mistake, he said, was to assume that the ethical standards and codes he had been brought up with at home, at school and in the RAF would apply equally in commercial life. This misapprehension cost him a lot of money.
At one point Paddy Barthropp provided a solution. He had left the RAF in 1958 and used his severance money to set up a Rolls-Royce hire firm. He invited Kingcome to be his partner. Kingcome wrote of Barthropp, that ‘underneath a facade of eccentric inanity there lurked one of the kindest, most generous and warm-hearted of men, and everyone sensed it’.3
Kingcome’s bachelor life came to an end when, with forty approaching, he fell in love with a young woman almost half his age called Lesley. She was the daughter of Sheila, one of the beautiful Macneal twins, and he had known her since she was a child. They had a long, happy marriage, presiding over a successful furniture business until they retired to Devon. Their neighbours there included Killy Kilmartin, who on leaving the RAF in 1958 had started a chicken farm. After fifteen years he had sold it, shifted around Europe for more than a decade and then returned to Devon. With Barthropp, who bought a retreat locally, they formed a convivial trio. Kingcome died in 1994, and Kilmartin in 1998. Cocky Dundas gave an address at Kingcome’s funeral. His four chief attributes, he said, were ‘courage, determination, a total lack of pomposity or self-importance and an everlasting lightness of heart and touch’.
This approach to life was evident in Kingcome’s attitude towards the Battle of Britain. ‘Why can’t they just talk about B of B pilots?’ he once complained in a letter. ‘Why does it always have to be heroes? I think it devalues the word and denigrates all those others who were called on to face just as great odds and whose contribution and sacrifices are just as great, but whose exploits hadn’t been pushed into the public eye by Churchill’s splendid oratory. Dying is what’s important, not the time and place you did it.’4
It was a typically generous sentiment. By the time it was expressed it was far too late to change things. The event achieved its cinematic apotheosis in 1969. The film The Battle of Britain was a serious, almost reverential work. Even after this time, Hollywood was not prepared to tinker with the myth. The technical advisers included Bob Tuck, and on the German side, Adolf Galland. Galland had ended up a much-decorated air force general. He professed to know nothing about Nazi atrocities until learning of them after the war. He was released after a long interrogation and went to Argentina to help train its air force before returning to Germany to start an aviation consultancy. In his autobiography, The First and the Last, which appeared in 1953, he presented himself as an amiable, apolitical professional soldier, who brought a touch of chivalry to a nasty business. He was widely accepted as such. He was on good terms with Bader, whom he had treated well after his capture. He was particularly close to Tuck, visiting him at his mushroom farm in Kent and inviting him to his home near Bonn to go boar shooting. Tuck’s death in May 1987 affected him strongly. His own, in February 1996, was marked in the British media as the passing of a Good German.
When the war finished many pilots were left with the suspicion that the most exciting and important passage of their existence was over, even though they still had most of their lives left to run. It was equally true for some non-combatants. Edith Heap never forgot Denis Wissler. She married a doctor after the war, but they were divorced after five years. Occasionally, during the intervening sixty years, she is convinced she has felt Denis’s presence. ‘Once,’ she told me, ‘I was sitting up in bed, reading, and suddenly there was Denis. He bent down and kissed me. I felt it. It was a lovely warm feeling. Then he smiled at me and faded away.’5
Despite their tendency to understatement and self-mockery, it was hard for the pilots to escape the realization that they had been involved in something great. The Battle of Britain, inevitably, underwent historical revision. Doubts have been cast on the seriousness of the German invasion plan and adjustments have been made to the odds that Fighter Command was facing. These re-examinations have done nothing to diminish the pilots’ achievement. More than sixty years later it seems as remarkable as ever.
Fighter Command dealt Hitler’s forces the first defeat they had suffered since the war began. The battle of attrition that the Luftwaffe was forced to fight had a profound effect on its future efficiency. A Luftwaffe general, Werner Kreipe, later judged that the decision to try and destroy the RAF had marked ‘a turning point in the history of the Second World War. The German Air Force…was bled almost to death and suffered losses which could never again be made good throughout the course of the war.’6
The victory was of colossal importance. ‘Our battle was a small one,’ wrote Peter Townsend, ‘but on its outcome depended the fate of the western world.’ It is true that Hitler spent little time on the invasion plan. But according to his assessment of the likely direction of events he did not need to. Either the RAF would be cleared from the skies, opening the way for a landing, or the Luftwaffe would inflict so much damage that the British government would be forced to seek terms. Either outcome would mean the end of effective resistance to the Nazis in Europe and the start of the ‘new dark age’ that Churchill had foreseen.
The fact that neither came to pass was due to the actions of 3,000 men and their machines and the intelligence of those who controlled t
hem. The balance of forces was not as uneven as the first version of the legend suggested, though there were periodic crises of manpower and aircraft. But the battle was not to be decided by resources alone. It was, in the end, a question of character and morale. The Fighter Boys’ thoughts were rarely darkened by the prospect of defeat. ‘We knew we had to win,’ wrote Townsend, ‘but, more than that, we were somehow certain that we could not lose. I think it had something to do with England. Miles up in the sky, we fighter pilots could see more of England than any other of England’s defenders had ever seen before. Beneath us stretched our beloved country, with its green hills and valleys, lush pastures and villages, clustering round an ancient church. Yes, it was a help to have England there below.’7 George Bennions, who was badly burned in the last fighting of the summer and blinded in one eye, believed that his unit, 41 Squadron, battered though it was, ‘would have fought on and on until there was nothing left’.8
It was a victory of spirit as much as of skill, and the spirit of the Fighter Boys was that of Britain. They came from every class and background and every area. Their values and attitudes were those of the people they were defending. It seemed to the teenage Yvonne Agazarian that her brother Noel and his comrades were sacrificing their lives to defend a way of doing things, ‘fighting with a real belief and dying moderately cheerfully’.9
They had taken a duty and turned it into a great act, and done so with a grace and style that was almost as significant as the event itself, for it reflected the decency of their cause. The Fighter Boys are almost all gone now. One by one the last of The Few are taking off on the final flight. Their real monument is Europe’s enduring peace. But long after the last veteran has departed, they will be remembered. Each September their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will come to the Abbey to give thanks. Then they will file outside and listen for the pulsing tone of the Spitfire engine, like the note of a grand piano after a bass key has been struck, fading and swelling as if it is trying to tell us something, the most poignant and romantic sound on earth.
Notes and References
Prologue: The White Hart
1 ‘he had recorded the events of the day’: 32 Squadron unofficial diary, quoted in Bob Ogley, Biggin on the Bump, Froglets Publications, Westerham, 1990.
2 Mr H. J. Edgerton: quoted in Daily Mirror, 16 August 1940.
3 ‘wrote a war artist’: Cuthbert Orde, Pilots of Fighter Command, Harrap, London, 1942, p. 10.
4 ‘would you like to go for a flip?’: Charles Fenwick, Dear Mother, privately published memoir.
1. Sportsmen and Butchers
1 Gierson: quoted in Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Tumult in the Clouds, the British Experience of War in the Air 1914-1918, Coronet, London, 1998, p. 19.
2 Rabagliati: quoted in ibid., p. 31.
3 Loraine: quoted in Andrew Boyle, Trenchard, Collins, London, 1962, p. 95.
4 Lewis: Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, Warner Books, London, 1998, pp. 40-5.
5 ‘Lewis wrote’: ibid., p. 45.
6 Albert Ball: Chaz Bowyer, Albert Hall VC, Bridge Books, London, 1994, pp. 32-5.
7 ‘He had but one idea’: ibid., p. 81.
8 ‘a hero…and he looked the part too’: ibid., p. 82.
9 ‘I do so want to leave’: ibid., p. 76.
10 ‘the topping day’: ibid., p. 111.
11 ‘May evening’: Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, p. 174.
12 ‘we met Huns’: The Personal Diary of Major Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock VC, introduced and annotated by Frederick Oughton, Neville Spearman, London, 1966, pp. 105 and 187.
13 ‘The Hun crashed’: ibid., p. 187.
14 ‘one general reasoned’: Alan Clark, Aces High, Cassell, London, 1999, p. 70.
15 ‘to finish myself’: Mannock, The Personal Diary, p. 166.
16 ‘my first flamerino’: ibid., p. 168.
17 ‘All tickets please!’: ibid., p. 190.
18 ‘I don’t feel’: ibid., p. 198.
19 ‘saw a flame’: ibid., p. 201.
20 ‘it gave me’: Manfred von Richthofen, The Red Air Fighter, Greenhill Books, London, 1999, pp. 89 and 96.
21 ‘honoured the fallen’: ibid., p. 94.
22 ‘The great thing’: Peter Kilduff, The Illustrated Red Baron, The Life and Times of Manfred von Richthofen, Arms and Armour Press, London, 1999, p. 49.
23 ‘so you were’: Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, p. 10.
24 ‘because he was’: John Grider: quoted in Steel and Hart, Tumult in the Clouds, p. 293.
25 ‘Ah! Tu es pilote!’: Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, p. 75.
26 ‘In such an atmosphere,’ ibid., p. 60.
27 ‘little black and tan’: Mannock, The Personal Diary, p. 119.
28 ‘My system was’: Steel and Hart, Tumult in the Clouds, p. 310.
29 ‘So it was over’: Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, p. 255.
2. Fighters versus Bombers
1 ‘Under Trenchard’: H. Montgomery Hyde, British Air Policy between the Wars 1918-1939, Heinemann, London, 1976, p. 49.
2 ‘the prophet Jonah’s’: ibid., p. 49.
3 ‘the vital esential’: ibid., p. 56.
4 ‘to really make’: ibid., p. 61.
5 ‘less cause to’: Andrew Boyle, Trenchard, Collins, London, 1962, p. 361.
6 ‘scene of grey corrugated’: Royal Air Force Cadet College Magazine, September 1920, vol. 1, No. 1.
7 ‘Nothing that has’: ibid.
8 ‘The first senior’: See Tony Mansell, ‘Flying Start: Educational and Social Factors in the Recruitment of Pilots of the Royal Air Force in the Interwar Years’, History of Education, 1997, vol. 26, No. 1, p. 72.
9 ‘The Cecil Committee’: ibid., p. 73.
10 ‘Air Ministry officials’: E.B. Haslam, The History of RAF Cranwell, HMSO, London 1982, p. 29.
11 ‘The curriculum’: ibid., p. 28.
12 ‘Fun was bruising’: ibid., p. 27.
13 ‘In January 1921’: Flight, 24 December 1924.
14 ‘The high standard’: John James, The Paladins, a Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II, Macdonald, London, 1990, p. 208.
15 ‘The policy meant’: ibid., p. 113.
16 ‘It wanted’: ibid., p. 142.
17 ‘Trenchard considered’: Boyle, Trenchard, p. 519.
18 ‘The squadron historian noted’: Tom Moulson, The Flying Sword, The Story of 601 Squadron, Macdonald, London, 1954, p. 22.
19 ‘before 1939’: John Terraine, The Right of the Line, The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939-1945, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1985, p. 50.
20 ‘As early as’: ibid., p. 11.
21 ‘the only defence’: ibid., p. 14.
22 ‘indicated the obsolescence’: ibid., p. 23.
23 ‘Half an hour later’: Paul Gallico, The Hurricane Story, Michael Joseph, London, 1959, p. 19.
24 ‘the sort of bloody silly name’: Len Deighton, Fighter, Pimlico, London, 1996, p. 77.
25 ‘Everyone therefore started out the same’: Montgomery Hyde, British Air Policy, p. 354.
26 ‘I cannot take the view’: ibid., p. 410.
3. ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’
1 Drake: interview with author.
2 Brothers: interview with author.
3 ‘as a special treat’: Dennis ‘Hurricane’ David, My Autobiography, Grub Street, London, 2000, p. 11.
4 Sanders: interview with author.
5 Beamont: Imperial War Museum Sound Archive (henceforth referred to as IWM), recording no. 10128.
6 ‘an RAF biplane’: Bob Doe, Fighter Pilot, Spellmount, Stapelhurst, 1991, p. 3.
7 ‘The fact that one was now overhead’: Alan Deere, Nine Lives, Crécy, Manchester, 1999, p. 15.
8 ‘there came the drone’: Brian Kingcome, A Willingness to Die, edited and introduced by Pete Ford, Tempus, Stroud, 1999, p. 8.
9 ‘were boyishly clear’: Geoffrey Page, Shot Down in Flames; Grub Street, London,
1999, p. 9.
10 ‘In one story’: Captain W. E. Johns, Biggles Story Collection, Red Fox, London, 1999, p. 40.
11 ‘In another’: W. E.Johns, The Camels are Coming, Red Fox, London, 1993, p. 97.
12 ‘the Foreword’: Johns, Biggles Story Collection, p. 72.
13 Brothers: interview with author.
14 Hancock: interview with author.
15 ‘Over tea his father’: Page, Shot Down in Flames, pp. 8-9.
16 Doe: interview with author.
17 ‘Deere left Auckland’: Deere, Nine Lives, p. 23.
18 ‘David had his first lesson’: David, My Autobiography, p. 12.
19 ‘and was absolutely thrilled’: Johnny Kent, One of the Few, Tempus, Stroud, 2000, p. 8.
20 Doe: interview with author.
21 ‘put the Tiger Moth’: Wing Commander H. R. ‘Dizzy’ Allen, Battle for Britain, Corgi, London, 1975, p. 13.
22 ‘queasy feeling engulfed me’: Tim Vigors, unpublished autobiography.
23 ‘Deere was so impatient’: Deere, Nine Lives, p. 26.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 47