Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

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  Squadron Leader Peter Devitt

  When we were up north at Acklington in Northumberland, there was one young chap in my squadron itching to get into the battle. He even asked at the very beginning if he could be posted to another squadron so he could get into the Dunkirk business. I told him, ‘No. There’s going to be plenty of time to get into the fight.’ When we did get into the fight, he was one of the first of my pilots to get shot down.

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  Flight Lieutenant Brian Kingcome

  The period after the evacuation from Dunkirk was the most dangerous period in my life. They sent us down to South Wales for the defence of the industrial area there. We had a bit of activity. We saw and shot down the odd daylight raider. Then they moved my flight to a field behind a pub called ‘The Swan’ at Bibury, which is in the middle of the Cotswolds — a beautiful part of the world.

  They gave us the most absurd, tiny farmer’s field, a couple of bell tents and no facilities at all and we were told we were responsible for the night defence of Wales. We flew from this tiny strip — the sort of thing you’d never dream of doing in peacetime, ever — with no aids at all to get back, except four half blacked-out glim lamps, and one chance light which was switched on for a second or two. We took off and groped our way around the night sky. It was black as sin. We couldn’t see a thing. We were landing all over England because we couldn’t find our way back. We were lucky no one was killed.

  In those days, you believed Operations and tended to do what you were told. We tried to convince Operations what we were doing was an absolute waste of time and there was no way we would be able to find a German bomber on a pitch dark night without aids. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear those buggers. It was quite alarming. You’d hear the German R/T getting louder and louder and louder and you’d think, ‘Christ, I’m going to be in a collision.’

  We finally convinced Operations that this was daft and dangerous and getting us nowhere. Then one chap, Alan Wright, was airborne and happened to look up and there in front of him were four glowing exhaust pipes. He lifted his nose and pressed his tit and shot down a German bomber. He came back all triumphant and he was almost lynched by the rest of us. We were furious. We’d been working hard to get released from this absurd job. He’d destroyed it all with this one total fluke.

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  Pilot Officer Geoffrey Howitt

  We were sent up to Aldegrove in Northern Ireland for convoy patrol mostly. But when things began hotting up in the south of England, our pilots were gradually posted away to replace casualties, as I was later on. They used to post other people in to Aldegrove from all sorts of different squadrons, men who had flown all sorts of different planes — Wellingtons, Lysanders, Battles. They came to us to learn to fly Hurricanes. We’d take them up and teach them formation flying and whiz around with them and practise dogfighting to get them used to the aircraft. Then they’d be posted away again. They’d be all sorts of people, from sergeants to squadron leaders. There was one chap, a squadron leader, a nice chap we converted on to Hurricanes. He went off and became commanding officer of a squadron down south and was killed soon afterwards.

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  Pilot Officer Jan Zumbach

  We were to form a one hundred percent Polish squadron, mechanics included. The greatest difficulty was the language. We would say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ without really knowing whether it was the right answer or not, sometimes with surprising results. A friend of mine had answered ‘yes’ to the questions, ‘Are you a pilot?’ and, ‘Are you in good health?’ But he went on saying ‘yes’ when asked if he had VD! He emerged from a nearby room, after a violent massage of the prostate gland, absolutely livid with rage. A few weeks later, he was dead. Not because of the massage, of course, but because of a Messerschmitt close on his tail.

  Finally, everyone passed Al, the grading required to become a fighter pilot. At the time, I thought that even hunchbacks would have been certified Al if only they knew how to hold a joystick and, like us, had picked up a little fighting experience here and there in Poland and France.

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  Squadron Leader Jack Satchell

  I was posted to Leconfield to form a Polish fighter squadron. Many Polish pilots had escaped from Poland and had made their way to England. They had been operational pilots in their own country. They’d all fought and many of them had shot down enemy aircraft. They didn’t speak a word of English. They didn’t even know the word ‘whisky’. We put them in link trainers and taught them the meaning of our codewords — bandits, angels, pancake, etc. They flew by instrument in those dummy aircraft, but didn’t move out of the building.

  We had an English and a Polish interpreter. The Polish interpreter was hopeless. The English interpreter was good but he understood far too much for the Poles’ liking. He overheard and understood too much of what they said among themselves about us.

  To start with, the Poles had no faith in us. They thought they knew it all. They’d fought against the Hun. They had doubts about whether we could. Each section of three in the squadron of twelve had to be English led; those were our rules. But we had to prove ourselves to them. I had a stroke of luck. The very day we were made operational, the section I was leading was scrambled. We took off and played hide-and-seek in the clouds with a Junkers 88. At one point in this game, he went into the cloud and I zoomed over the top, hoping to meet him coming out. I saw him coming out and gave him a full deflection shot and he disappeared into the next cloud. I thought we’d lost him. We couldn’t find him any more. We were told on the R/T to come down and when we landed, we found the whole station out on the tarmac waiting to receive us. My one burst had killed the German pilot and he had crashed. I’d shot down our first enemy aircraft. After that the Poles thought I was Dead-Eye Dick. It was sheer luck. I’d never seen a damned Hun in the air before.

  We were all very struck, right from the beginning, with the exceptional courtesy of the Poles. They were unnecessarily punctilious about saluting — in fact, they saluted me every time they saw me, and practically every time they were spoken to! They also invariably addressed me as mon commandant, and the three British flight lieutenants they addressed as mon capitaine. If cigarettes were produced, they always hastened to light mine for me — even if they had given me the said cigarette, and, at the beginning, they always said as they did this, ‘Excuse, sir.’ They were really very nice in very many respects and quite a few of them were first class fellows.

  But there were all sorts of discipline problems. They were very inclined to have ladies in their quarters, which was a bit frowned on in the officers’ mess. They held boozy parties. Sometimes I would tell them to do one thing and the most senior Pole would tell them to do another. He was a colonel in the Polish Army Air Corps and was made deputy CO of the squadron, as an acting squadron leader, under me. It wasn’t a very happy relationship. I’d tell them to do so-and-so, and he’d tell them to take no notice — to do something else. They usually did as I told them but I had to be sharpish at times. It was a bit irritating.

  He also caused a lot of difficulties over the question of discipline with the Polish airmen, giving out punishments, most of them highly illegal from an RAF point of view. He gave one man seven days detention in the guardroom with a rigid diet of water for breakfast, one slice of bread for lunch, water for tea, and another slice of bread for supper — every day! At night, a Polish NCO was detailed to go in to the wretched man every hour and wake him up and make him lie down alternately on the floor and on a wooden work bench without any form of bedding, other than a blanket. Of course this sort of punishment would never do in an RAF station. It had to be stopped.

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  Flight Lieutenant Gordon Sinclair

  A flight commander was required in the newly forming 310 Squadron and I was given the job. I was told it was going to be a squadron of foreigners. People wondered who they would be — Frenchmen? Norwegians? We hadn’t really heard of the Czech flyers. They were far few
er in numbers than the Poles. Far fewer had managed to get out when the Germans overran their country. This particular lot had made their way to Palestine individually and had come via the Mediterranean and up through France, where they hadn’t been treated awfully well.

  They varied in age. Their senior officer, who doubled up with Douglas Blackwood as commanding officer, was much older than any of us — about forty-five. He was a very experienced pilot, but I don’t think he’d seen any combat. The younger ones were nineteen and twenty. They were very smartly attired in their own dark blue uniforms with quite a lot of gold braiding.

  At first they were an unknown quantity to us. We took them up in two-seater training aircraft to see if they could fly. We realized at once that they were very good pilots, except for one man. He’d been swept along with everyone else. Because of the language problem, he didn’t understand what was happening. Someone took him up to see what sort of pilot he was. He thought he was just going for a ride. It turned out he couldn’t fly at all. He’d been a navigator.

  The Czechs were totally disciplined. They did what was expected of them, though not necessarily what they were told to do, because they knew sort of instinctively what they were supposed to do. One of them, a man named Zima, was a marvellous pilot. He’d been a flying instructor before. And Prchal had been a pilot for the Bata Shoe Company before the war, flying shoes from Czechoslovakia to England. He was a very steady pilot.

  The young ones were very frightened of their commanding officer. One day, early on, one of these lads crashed a Hurricane in landing. The undercarriage buckled up. They quickly had a court martial among themselves and they were going to shoot him behind the hangar. Douglas Blackwood and I discovered what was going on and said, ‘You can’t do that sort of thing. We run the show, not you.’

  Foreigners, like the Poles and Czechs who constituted four ferocious RAF squadrons of their own before the battle was over, made up only a small proportion of Fighter Command’s manpower. The Royal Canadian Air Force provided another squadron and there was a sprinkling of other foreigners — Free French, Belgians and seven Americans who joined the RAF despite American neutrality.

  The British pilots themselves came from a variety of backgrounds. Regular RAF pilots, graduates of the RAF College at Cranwell, the true professionals, included several colonials, like Flight Lieutenant Deere who had come over from New Zealand in 1937 to join the RAF. They considered themselves, and were considered by the other pilots, to be as British as native-born Britons and fought with equal, and sometimes greater, ferocity. There were also ‘short service commission’ regulars who had been pre-war RAF pilots as well, but who were not really part of the RAF establishment, not having been to Cranwell and unlikely to be seeking a lifelong career in the service, which in no way diluted the central role they too played in the Battle.

  Auxiliary squadrons consisted mostly of reasonably well-off young men who had flown pre-war as a hobby at weekends. Theirs had been exclusive clubs. Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone recalls that before he was permitted to join 602 (‘City of Glasgow’) Auxiliary Squadron before the war, he was put through a series of discreet tests to determine his social acceptability, the last one of which was a ‘dining in’ night during which, ‘to this day, I have never had as much booze poured inside me. They wanted to know how I behaved when I was drunk.’ A few of the auxiliaries were very wealthy, scions of some of the richest families in the land, owning their own planes and expensive sports cars and regularly seen in the company of glamorous young women. These dashing young men gave many people the impression that all auxiliaries were playboys when, in fact, this was not true. When the war began, the auxiliary squadrons, playboys and all, were formally absorbed into Fighter Command. They provided strength and numbers (fourteen squadrons in all) the RAF could not have done without. They soon lost their exclusive nature as their casualties mounted and non-auxiliary personnel had to be brought into their squadrons as replacements.

  Volunteer Reserve (VR) pilots had also been weekend flyers before the war, but of an inferior social rank. They were mostly middle class young men who had worked in banks or offices or ran small businesses. Slotted into existing squadrons when the fighting started, they, like the auxiliaries, brought to battle the experience they had gathered on their weekend flying diversions, as well as the determination to defend their country against the would-be invader.

  Men who were RAF sergeant pilots at the beginning of the war tended to be flyers of considerable competence. Many had been RAF groundcrew who had volunteered for flying training. The best of them had been permitted to stay on as pilots. At the height of the battle, when losses were great, there were times in combat when a sergeant led a squadron or part of a squadron which included new recruits who outranked him. It was understood, however, that he would surrender command as soon as an officer in the squadron seemed capable of assuming it, or when one was sent in from another squadron to take over.

  There was class distinction in the RAF, as there was and still is in British society as a whole. It was said, for example, that a regular officer was an officer trying to be a gentleman, an auxiliary was a gentleman trying to be an officer and a VR was neither trying to be both. Regular officers and VRs were often cautious about going drinking with auxiliaries, because it was believed to be potentially a very expensive outing, many of the more affluent auxiliaries being known to insist on champagne rather than beer when out carousing with the lads. Several men who were sergeant pilots recall that social distinctions tended to fall away as the battle progressed. But that wasn’t the experience of all of them.

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  Sergeant David Cox

  Some of the officers were very snobbish to sergeant pilots. Most couldn’t care less, but even with them the difference was there. You would be in a heck of a scrap up in the sky with everybody equal. But when you landed, the officers went one way and the sergeants went the other. When I was commissioned the next year, I was very quickly told off for spending time with my old friends in the sergeants’ mess.

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  Sergeant Dick Kilner

  I was leading the section — I think it was Blue Section — when Paddy Finucane came to the squadron as a pilot officer. I was fairly experienced, having started flying four years before. When the war broke out, I’d had about three hundred hours in all sorts of aircraft. There were other sergeant pilots leading sections as well.

  Finucane had no experience when he was put in my section. He flew number two or three to me. When he was promoted to flying officer later in the battle, he was put in charge of the section. The flight commander told me he was putting Finucane in charge — would I fly as his number two and keep an eye on him? I don’t think they liked having a flying officer flying behind a sergeant.

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  Sergeant Mike Croskell

  We called them ‘Sir’ while they usually called each other by Christian names. It never occurred to me at the time that there was anything peculiar about them being officers and me being a sergeant. It was an accepted thing. I guess the authorities couldn’t help believing there had to be a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation. But it had no bearing whatsoever on performance on duty or in combat. After we’d lost a lot of men, I led a flight until new officers became sufficiently experienced to take over. I didn’t care that they didn’t make me an officer, but I sometimes felt, ‘Why can’t the most experienced people be leading the sections?’

  On the eve of the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe boasted almost 2,500 attack planes ready for combat operations in Western Europe — 980 modern fighters and 1,500 bombers. To meet them, the RAF could put aloft 620 Spitfires and Hurricanes, plus eighty-four Blenheims and Defiants, which were, however, no match for Messerschmitt 109s and 110s. For strategic and reserve maintenance reasons, only half of Fighter Command’s squadrons were assigned to duty in that part of England which was to bear the brunt of German attacks. This gave the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers even greater significance. There was n
o mystery to the fact that swarms of enemy aircraft coming in to attack would regularly be met only by small formations of British fighters sent up to intercept them.

  In addition to outnumbering the British in the air, the Germans were able to choose where and when to attack. One of the British pilots described it as, ‘something like a tennis match in which you never got to serve. You were always playing back what the other man was doing to you.’ But the British had the advantage of a technological innovation about which the Germans knew, but which they didn’t yet fully appreciate.

  British scientists had been experimenting with Radio Direction Finders, or ‘radar’ as it was later called, right through the 1930s. By the summer of 1940, a reasonably tight chain of radar stations had been planted along the eastern and southern coasts of England, facing Europe. Radar was able to pick up radio impulses from German aircraft as they climbed from their bases in Western Europe, joined in formation and made their way towards England. Had that radar chain not been in place along the English shore, the outcome of the battle might well have been different. The alternative for Fighter Command would have been the maintenance of permanent patrols over the Channel and the North Sea during daylight hours. Some patrols were maintained as back-up for radar but, with RAF resources so meagre, standing patrols without radar could never have provided wide enough or fast enough early warning. They would also have exposed British aircraft and pilots to further risk away from their primary defence positions. The consequences for Britain could have been calamitous.