Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

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  Flying Officer Barrie Heath

  We went in pretty high — something like 25,000 feet. Smoke was going right up into the sky from the oil tanks burning down below. There were a lot of bombs going down on the beach and on the mass of men and ships down there. It was an awesome sight. Up in the sky, the Germans tried to shoot our tails off and we tried to shoot theirs. We patrolled up and down in open formation. At one point I moved off to bring back one of our men, Sergeant Sadler, the right-hand man of the back section of the squadron, who’d got a bit lost in a turn. He must have been looking the other way when the squadron turned left. I went out to shepherd him back into the formation. I couldn’t contact him on the R/T because we were supposed to be on radio silence. One of the chaps told me that when I went off after him a 110 took my place in that formation almost immediately. If I hadn’t turned off, I guess he would have shot my backside off. After that, it was all fighting. I dived down with one or two others on a big formation of Stukas, shot one chap up and was so excited I kept on firing my guns till I ran out of ammunition. There was no point in hanging around after that. I dived down and beetled off at low height for home.

  They sent us off again in the afternoon. It was all very exciting and a bit unnerving. It was our baptism of fire. We’d been pretty well trained, but Dunkirk seemed a long way from home and it was a bit shaking to see the British being booted out of Europe.

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  Flying Officer John Bisdee

  The Spitfire hadn’t got back armour for the pilot at the time. Some of our pilots were probably shot dead whereas they might have been untouched or only wounded if the armour, which was then put in, had been there. Every day, a few less of our men came back from over Dunkirk. We didn’t know the final count for a while because when a man didn’t return, lots of things might have happened to him. He might have got shot down and taken prisoner. He might have got shot down and landed on the beaches or in the sea and might be coming back with the troops. He might have gone down in the sea — one of our pilots, Sergeant Bennett, did precisely that — and been picked up by a ship that didn’t immediately report the fact. He could have got to one of our advance aerodomes, like Manston. It wasn’t till the end of the Dunkirk thing that somebody did the sums and we realized how many people we’d lost.

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  Flight Lieutenant Bob Stanford-Tuck

  We started over Dunkirk with very bad tactics. We were flying over the beaches in formations which were much too tight. Manoeuvering was cumbersome. You had to concentrate on keeping position in the formation. You couldn’t look around. The Germans were flying much looser formations. They bounced us in our very first encounter over Dunkirk. We lost a pilot — a young fellow called Pat Learmond. He went down in flames. The next patrol that same day we lost our squadron leader, a flight commander and one or two others. The squadron leader was Roger Bushell, who crash landed, was captured and then was shot four years later by the Gestapo when he organized the Great Escape from Stalagluft 3. I found myself squadron commander. I said to myself and all the boys, ‘This is enough. Tomorrow we’re flying open formation, in pairs.’ But in two days of fighting, the squadron lost five pilots and five Spitfires, too, which was as dicey as losing pilots because we were starting to run short of planes.

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  Squadron Leader James Leathart

  While we were covering the Dunkirk evacuation, I saw a Spitfire that had been hit. White glycol was streaming from behind it. I knew it would never get back across the Channel to England. I watched it go down and saw it land at Calais Marck, a small airfield outside Calais.

  When I got back to England, I learned that Squadron Leader Drogo White was missing over France and realized it was his Spitfire I had seen go down. White was CO of 74 Squadron which was based at Hornchurch, as was 54 Squadron, which I commanded. We were the only squadron which had a new Miles Master trainer. It was a wooden two-seater resembling a Spitfire or Hurricane in that it had a Rolls-Royce engine and a fairly high performance.

  I went to the Hornchurch station commander and said, ‘I saw Drogo White go down at Calais Marck.’ I asked him if I could take along my two flight commanders — A1 Deere and Johnny Allen — to escort me in their Spitfires while I tried to pick up White in the Miles Master and bring him back. The station master said OK and off we went.

  We got to Calais Marck and I landed there but White was nowhere in sight. I thought he’d pop out of somewhere, but he didn’t so I took off again. When I got to about 1,000 feet, I heard Al Deere shout, ‘Messerschmitts!’ At that moment, I saw tracers go right past me. A1 Deere and Johnny Allen went after the Messerschmitts, but I’d had a hell of a fright and instead of heading home, as A1 and Johnny did when they’d used up all their ammunition and were low on fuel, I landed at Calais Marck again and switched off.

  By that time, a real battle had broken out above between other Messerschmitts and Spitfires. I was afraid one of the Germans would come down and shoot up my aircraft and me as well. I ran to a ditch, jumped in and damn near landed on top of the missing Drogo White. He said, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ He hadn’t seen me when I’d landed the first time. He’d been hiding from the German army. There was a main road at the side of the airfield and German tanks and motorcycles and things were roaring along it. How the hell they didn’t see my bright orange aircraft on the ground, I’ll never know. We were stuck in that ditch for a half-hour or so, watching the battle going on above us and watching aircraft coming down in flames, including some of ours.

  When things calmed down a bit, we thought we’d try to make our getaway. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t have an electric starter for the aircraft, as they did back at Hornchurch. We had to use cranks which were stored in the aircraft. We had a handle each and were cranking away, with the Germans going by on the road at the side of the field. We cranked and cranked, eventually got it started, both jumped in, took off and flew back across the Channel. We headed back home at about six feet over the water.

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  Edward R. Murrow, CBS Radio News

  London, 2 June — Yesterday I spent several hours at what may be tonight or next week Britain’s first line of defence, an airfield on the southeast coast ... I talked with pilots as they came back from Dunkirk. They stripped off their light jackets, glanced at a few bullet holes in wings or fuselage, and as the ground crews swarmed over the aircraft, refuelling motors and guns, we sat on the ground and talked. Out in the middle of the field, the wreckage of a plane was being cleared up. It had crashed the night before. The pilot had been shot in the head but managed to get back to his field ...

  I can tell you what those boys told me. They were the cream of the youth of Britain. As we sat there, they were waiting to take off again. They talked of their own work; discussed the German air force with the casualness of Sunday morning halfbacks discussing yesterday’s football. There were no nerves, no profanity, and no heroics. There was no swagger about those boys in wrinkled and stained uniforms. The movies do that sort of thing much more dramatically than it is in real life ...

  When the squadron took off, one of them remarked quite casually that he’d be back in time for tea. About that time, a boy of twenty drove up in a station wagon. He weighed about one hundred and fifteen pounds. He asked the squadron leader if he could have someone fly him back to his own field. His voice was loud and flat; his uniform was torn, had obviously been wet. He wore a pair of brown tennis shoes, three sizes too big. After he’d gone, I asked one of the men ... what was the matter with him. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘he was shot down over at Dunkirk on the first patrol this morning. Landed in the sea, swam to the beach, was bombed for a couple of hours, came home in a paddle steamer. His voice sounds like that because he can’t hear himself. You get that way after you’ve been bombed a few hours.’

  During the Dunkirk operation, the RAF lost eighty pilots and one hundred aircraft, including Spitfires. Dowding had earlier refused to send his most advanced fighting planes o
ver France for fear that one of them might be captured intact by the Germans. Spitfire pilots were, therefore, ordered to patrol only over the sea at Dunkirk, but some pilots, caught up in the heat of battle, went in hot pursuit over land.

  The severe RAF losses in the operation were another serious blow to British defences. But it was claimed that, at the same time, 262 German aircraft were shot down by British fighters near or over Dunkirk, more than two for every British plane lost. German records later showed that, in reality, only about half the numbers claimed by RAF pilots were brought down. But for the first time, Fighter Command was believed by the British, and believed itself, capable of facing the Luftwaffe and giving better than it received.

  It was a sorely needed morale booster, though dwarfed at the time by the almost delirious relief that most of the British troops had been lifted from the beaches of Dunkirk and brought home, instead of the comparative few the Chiefs of Staff in London had dared to hope for. General Alan Brooke, soon to be Commander-in-Chief of British Home Forces, said, ‘Had the BEF not returned, it is hard to see how the army could have recovered from this blow. The reconstitution of our land forces would have been so delayed as to endanger the whole course of the war.’ Also brought back to England from Dunkirk were 112,000 French troops, who were to form the core of the Free French forces that were to fight alongside the British and the Americans later in the war.

  As for France itself, it was on the verge of surrender to the Germans. Its capitulation was to be formalized when a new government, rapidly patched together, accepted draconian armistice terms from the Germans on 22 June. But after the dismal experiences of their forces in Europe since the launching of the German offensive less than a month earlier, many British leaders and most British fighting men were not at all troubled by that development.

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  Pilot Officer Christopher Currant

  When France withdraw from the war, my feeling was of sheer and utter relief. At last we were totally on our own. We didn’t have to depend on anybody. We felt that now we could really tackle this thing without any hassle, without any political nonsense. We could really get to grips with the thing. There had been a great disadvantage in having our strength frittered away in France, in Europe. We were losing a lot of pilots and aeroplanes. It was denuding Fighter Command of very badly needed men and material at a crucial stage when we were going to be facing the Germans on our own. The French didn’t seem to have the determination to fight to keep their freedom. There was too much shilly-shallying. There was great relief when we were finally on our own. I remember people saying, ‘Now we can get on with it without any nonsense.’

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  Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding

  Thank God we are now alone.

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  King George VI

  Letter to his Mother

  Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.

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  Winston Churchill

  The Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

  BRITAIN AT BAY

  Remarkable though it was, the evacuation at Dunkirk and the events leading up to it had to be put in a proper perspective. As Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, ‘We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’

  The fact was that the British had been thrown out of Europe and had paid a steep price for their abortive efforts to stop the Germans in France. In less than a month, they had lost 68,000 troops — killed, missing, captured or wounded. On the beaches of Dunkirk and scattered elsewhere along their line of retreat, they had left most of their military vehicles. Only twenty-two of the 704 tanks sent to France were brought back. They had sent 840 of the 1,000 anti-tank guns in their armoury to France to stop the German panzers; none of those had been brought back. They had also been forced to abandon most of their artillery and a half-million ton of stores and ammunition; anti-tank gun ammunition was so scarce that it was now forbidden to use any for firing practice. The Royal Navy had sustained serious losses as well — six destroyers had been sunk and nineteen more damaged.

  Many of the RAF fighter squadrons were now dangerously under strength, and many of the fighter pilots, upon whose capabilities and endurance the defence of the realm now rested, were exhausted and badly in need of rest and recuperation. Those who had become battle tested veterans in four turbulent weeks, and who remained on frontline duty, had to maintain combat readiness, while new pilots, brought in to fill the gaps left by those lost in Europe and over the Channel, had to be trained to do battle in the air.

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  Sergeant Bernard Jennings

  We did a lot of practice. Day and night. Air testing. Testing guns. Everything. You couldn’t get too much training. We had two new boys. I’d take them up to a high altitude in a Vic formation and suddenly cut my throttle. Nothing would happen for a while because the air was so thin up there. Then slowly they’d begin creeping up on me. I’d call out over the radio, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Then, as they wagged their tails to try to kill off their speed, I’d open my throttle again and they’d suddenly be miles back. They learnt you’ve got to be careful when you’re at high altitude. It’s not the same when you’re at 1,000 feet. You’ve got to anticipate a lot earlier, and the Germans were always high above us. Low down you could yank the thing around and pull the throttle back and stay in formation. High up there, you couldn’t.

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  Pilot Officer John Bisdee

  We were sent a new CO, George Darley, and he really pulled the squadron together after the beating we had taken at Dunkirk. And we got a whole lot of new pilots. Darley insisted on an enormous amount of squadron and individual training. He used to act as a target. He’d fly along and everybody practised attacks on him — quarter attacks, head-on attacks and every other kind of attack.

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  Squadron Leader George Darley

  I realized when I took command of the squadron that I had to do something with these people. The men ranged in age from thirty down to nineteen. Aside from being past their prime as fighter pilots, the older chaps were depressed from having lost close friends over Dunkirk. There was a danger the morale of the younger ones, who’d just joined the squadron as replacements, might be affected. Time was not on my side so I got them all together — the airmen as well, because lack of morale at the top doesn’t take long to filter down — and I gave them all a good talking to. I didn’t hold back. I told them exactly what was wrong with them. I told them I knew about their personal and flying problems. But we had a job to do and they would have to change their ways. There was a bit of a deadly hush and some of the men sucked their teeth. They didn’t like it at all. But things did improve. I tried to analyse for them what had been responsible for their high rate of casualties at Dunkirk. I asked them what they had done, and what they had done next, and what they should have done. The remarkable thing was, they’d never sat down and analysed what had happened.

  And we trained. I had the new boys go up with their flight commanders, and sometimes with myself. I’d see if the chap could stay in formation. We’d practise dogfights to see if he could handle his aircraft and look after himself. We did rolls and turns to see if he could stay on your tail to shoot you down.

  *


  Miss Edith Starling, Epsom, Surrey

  Letter to her Mother, 6 June

  Dear Mother

  ... We sometimes hear the dull thud of gunfire off the coast of France and yesterday afternoon I saw two Spitfires darting like dragonflies in the blue of the sky, engaged in a mock battle. It was quite fascinating to watch them twisting and turning, weaving in and out in an intricate pattern, but not so pleasant if their guns had been spitting fire in a death duel.

  Uncle has a book on identifying British and German planes and after seeing a formation of bombers flying overhead, we hurry in to try to identify them but it will be a long time before I get them correctly named ...

  Uncle has been sticking strips of cellophane over the windows and we have had many arguments as to the best place to stand for shelter. Aunty says that if the Germans did invade our land, if she could do nothing else, she would spit at them. Now what do you think of your sister!

  Your loving daughter, Edith

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  Flying Officer Alan Deere

  Our squadron was so badly depleted after Dunkirk, we were sent up north to reform with new pilots coming out of operational training units. Some of them were pushed through in rather a hurry. We were short of pilots. Some of these chaps got five, ten hours on a Spitfire, and their total flying experience wasn’t very great. Part of our job was to take them up and train them and get them britched up for our return south to prepare for what turned out to be the Battle of Britain. It was a hairy task, as I learned to my cost. I was teaching one of the newcomers dogfight manoeuvres and how to follow the chap in front when he flew right into me and cut my tail off. It was at about 10,000 feet. I baled out at about a thousand in a bit of a mess with a parachute that was partially torn from me. I was unable to pull the ripcord, but for some miraculous reason it opened on one side and broke my fall. I landed in a horizontal position in a cesspool, which saved my life. The pilot who ran into me got out all right. He was later shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans.