by Norman Gelb
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Pilot Officer Bobby Oxspring
The idea of getting the Hurricanes in on the bombers while the Spitfires kept the German fighter cover busy often didn’t work out. You couldn’t get them all into action at the same moment. If you were only a minute apart, it was too late.
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General Sir Hastings Ismay, Secretary to the War Cabinet
From the moment one set foot on the tarmac [of fighter stations in Kent and Sussex], one sensed the tension in the air — the pilots standing by ‘in readiness’ waiting to ‘scramble’ into their machines at a moment’s notice. It was impossible to look at those young men, who might within a matter of minutes be fighting and dying to save us, without mingled emotions of wonder, gratitude and humility. The physical and mental strain of the long hours at dispersal, the constant flying at high altitudes — two or three sorties a day were normal, six or seven not uncommon — must have been prodigious. And yet they were always so cheerful, so confident and so obviously dedicated.
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Pilot Officer Tim Elkington
I was given the usual training on biplanes before I was sent to join 1 Squadron in July. But I’d never flown a Hurricane before. They gave me forty minutes on a Miles Master trainer when I got to the squadron and then up in a Hurricane the next day. I did a lot of patrols, but I didn’t see my first German aircraft close up until mid-August.
I was fairly frightened when it finally happened. I felt a nasty chill when I saw that black cross on the aircraft and thought, ‘My God, it’s going round the back of me.’ I wasn’t going to let it get on my tail. I worked very hard to make sure it didn’t, doing a high speed stall getting around to follow it. Luckily I had a height and sun advantage. I chased it, fired at it and thought I got it. It was smoking, went on its back and went down through the cloud. But looking back, I’m sure that — as a nineteen-year-old newcomer — was firing at it from far too far away to have finished it off.
I was shaking as I flew back to base. I kept seeing odd aircraft through light cloud cover and kept wondering, ‘Is it a German or is it one of us?’ I had shot my bolt, physically and mentally, and my main purpose was to get home as fast as I could. I wasn’t looking to do any more fighting that day. When I landed, I didn’t say very much. I didn’t say much for a full half-hour. I was overawed by what had happened.
I was shot down the next day when the squadron went up to intercept a raid. I was top weaver. That was a very exposed position, going back and forth over the top of the squadron, looking everywhere for enemy aircraft. Suddenly I looked down and the squadron was gone! I was sitting up there all alone, wondering what the heck to do. Then I saw a 109 going out over Portsmouth, so I went after it.
Previously, I’d been jinking all over the place, waltzing all over the sky, making sure that nothing was sitting on my tail. But I straightened out to go after that 109 and that was a fatal mistake. Something hit my aircraft and it was suddenly on fire. I tried very quickly to get out, got half-way over the side and was thrown back in. I tried again and was again thrown back in. So I sat down in the cockpit and thought, and decided that if I really wanted to get out, I should undo the radio and oxygen connections that were attached to me. I undid them and looked at my watch. It was 1.40.1 thought that was a good time to go and out I went.
My mother lived at the time at Hayling Island, which is right under where I was shot down. Against all the odds, she was on the balcony looking at what was going on above. She saw a Hurricane chased by two 109s. She saw it hit and she saw the pilot bale out. She didn’t know it was me. I had an ambulance girl telephone her later to tell her I was all right.
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11 Group Intelligence Bulletin
32 Squadron on patrol sighted several formations of Junkers 88s and Dornier 215s escorted by Messerschmitt 109s. The pilots report that the Messerschmitt 109s circled round on each other’s tails and, when attacked from below, one would drop out from the most advantageous position for an attack, deliver a short attack and rejoin the circle, when another would take its place, and so on. It was found to be very difficult to combat these tactics.
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Associated Press
Southern England, 13 August — Here in this part of England, against which the central fury of the Nazi attack has thus far fallen, life went on today at its accustomed strolling gait.
During one of today’s raids in the Dover district, a correspondent found workmen continuing to repair the roof of a cottage damaged yesterday. A farmer went on feeding his pigs, and a small boy continued to pick green beans in his family’s vegetable garden.
In a house that had not a window left, the family remained at the dinner table. A newspaper man pushing his head through a gaping window, apologising at the same time for the intrusion, was told by the father of the family, ‘You aren’t the first one. It’s a bit public not having windows, but the fresh air is nice.’
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Sussex Daily News, 17 August
We have invested our money as a nation in the best material, the best machines and the best men, and the outcome is the Royal Air Force. The dividend on the investment is coming in. The loss of at least 169 enemy machines for a loss of 34 of ours is a return so impressive that some are sceptical ... Ours are better in quality against Nazi superiority in quantity. This is an almost elementary fact. Germany is outstandingly the nation of the cheap and nasty in the mechanical world. We must redress the balance but preserve the British quality. That is the way to victory.
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Mrs Jean Cook
Letter to her nephew, Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone
My dearest Sandy,
You have no idea the excitement you have caused by having your photograph in the papers [when he received the Distinguished Flying Cross]. I am told the villagers feel a sort of reflected glory. The little boy next door is very disappointed that it is only your head and shoulders that is showing. I believe Jeannie had bought five Bulletins [a Glasgow newspaper which printed the photograph]. Mrs Patterson phoned from Greenock to say how pleased she was about your honour. We are all terribly proud of you. I hear your mother spent a whole day at the phone. I wish you would come north so that we can have a look at you. With all my love, dear,
Yours,
Jean
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Notes on Conference of 11 Group Sector Commanders
The AOC illustrated (with graphs) the increase during the present phase of operations in the number of aircraft lost and, to a lesser extent, the number of casualties to pilots. It was generally agreed this was due to several causes: the employment of new squadrons with little experience of engagements with enemy fighters, an increasing proportion of new and inexperienced pilots on existing squadrons, and the better armour and armament of enemy bombers. There was also the fact that the enemy had practically ceased employing dive bombers, of which our squadrons had taken heavy toll in the past.
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Flight Lieutenant Alan Deere
The radar was sometimes swamped by the incoming German raids. The filtering system on the radar wasn’t entirely reliable in those days, nor was the ground reporting of the Observer Corps. I don’t say that disparagingly, but that was the situation. We were under pressure. Raids did get in, not undetected but unplotted, and we were told to stand by in our cockpits and told to start up and told to switch off and eventually told to ‘Scramble! Get off as quickly as you can!’
One time when that happened, there were about three new pilots in the squadron. I was leading the squadron then, the squadron commander having been shot down. The procedure for take-off was to go around the far side of the airfield and for the others to follow around on the other side of me. But one of the new chaps got lost and taxied across in front of me. So once I had swung around to take off, I couldn’t move.
I shouted at him, ‘Get out of the bloody way!’ Eventually he did, by which time the rest of the squadron had gone off. Just as I was about to get airborne, with the other tw
o in my section, the bombs started to come down from Heinkels above.
The first one landed to my right as I took off. Looking to my left on the far side of the airfield, I thought, ‘He’s missed us.’ But the sticks of bombs were coming right across the field. The next bomb landed right in front of me. That’s all I remember — the plane going up in the air and landing on its back, ploughing along the airfield, with me still strapped in the cockpit. My number two wasn’t hurt, but he was blown clean into the air right off the airfield perimeter. He landed in a creek. My number three had his wing blown off. He skippered along on his side, but fortunately he was able to get out of his aircraft and get me out of my cockpit because I was trapped there upside down and there was petrol all over the bloody place. I was pretty badly concussed and he had dislocated his hip. We tried to help each other across the field. A 109 came down and strafed us, but missed.
Because an inexperienced man had cut across my path, we had lost three planes. The medical officer bandaged my head and told me to take the rest of the day off and to report to him the next day. But by the time the day had finished, we had lost a few more men and needed all the pilots we could find.
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Squadron Leader Tom Gleave
When a sprogg came to your squadron from an Operational Training Unit, you had to nurse him; you had to bring him along. In the middle of the battle, you were always saddled with at least four of these sproggs, whom you had to look after while sending chaps off to intercept enemy aircraft. It was hard to put a lot of training in. You had a situation in which a couple of men might be on leave, two chaps were in the station hospital because they’d got shrapnel in their arms or some place. Group Ops would call and ask, ‘What have you got?’ They’d be told, ‘We’ve got three aircraft and two pilots or four aircraft and three pilots.’ You’d be told, ‘Put a defensive flight around the aerodrome, just in case.’ You’d take a couple of sproggs with you because they might be the only ones left on the ground. The flight commander would keep an eye on them, but when combat began, he couldn’t keep an eye on anyone but the enemy.
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Pilot Officer Peter Brown
When I was transferred south from 12 Group, the pace of events was a lot faster. The first mission I went on seemed uneventful. When we got back and had a debriefing, I learned that some of the pilots had seen 109s in the distance and some of the others had seen something else. I had seen absolutely nothing. The next time up, I happened to see a little bit of something. But it took me about four trips to get tuned in, to see what was going on. A lot of people were hit in their first flights and didn’t know what hit them. If you look out the small window of a passenger aircraft today, you see there’s a lot of space out there to look for an aeroplane. If you open up the whole area above and below you, there’s an enormous amount of space for an aircraft to be in.
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Operations Record Book, 141 Squadron
Sergeant Wickens ordered to carry out an operation patrol at 00.50 hours but in taxiing out he collided with a stationary aircraft, damaging both machines. Pilot Officer Smith was then sent up, carried out the patrol, but overshot in landing and damaged his aircraft by colliding with a gunpost at the edge of the aerodrome. Crews of aircraft (Defiants) are injured.
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Pilot Officer Dave Glaser
I’d got two problems after I left training. One: I’d never fought in an aeroplane in my life. Two: the Spitfire was the fastest thing I’d ever been in. To me it was a bit of a handful. I’d got to try to steer this thing, shoot and do all the rest while this large number of enemy aeroplanes were coming in.
Jeffrey Quill was in the squadron when I joined it. He knew my father well. I was only nineteen. When I joined, he said, ‘You fly as my number two.’ He saw me through the early stages, when one learned fast and needed some sort of guidance. I was very lucky, though I think I gave him his first grey hairs. We were coming down through cloud one time, with Wigg on the left, Jeff in the centre, and me on the right. As we came down, we closed up and closed up and eventually you could just see the wing tip of the aeroplane you were formating on. But I lost sight of it in the cloud and thought the best thing I could do was break away. When I came out of the cloud, I finally spotted the other two up above, far to my right, looking around for me. I had cut under or over them in the cloud. Jeff told me later that all he could think of when he lost sight of me was, ‘What the hell am I going to tell his old man?’
We’d do readiness for two days, and then we’d be down to thirty minutes, and then we’d be on release. Release would invariably be from midday one day to midday the next. Jeffrey, who’d been the chief test pilot at Vickers Supermarine, the people who built the Spitfire, used to get a Vickers car sent down to the base when we were due for release. He would take some of us up to London and then pick us up on the way back the next day. When we were released, everybody rushed right off, because if you didn’t get away quickly, you might be caught for another do or something. We were waiting for this big Vickers limousine to arrive one day, but it was late. The phone went. Jeffrey answered it and was asked, ‘Any of 65 Squadron there?’ He said, ‘There are five of us.’ They said, ‘Right. Get airborne immediately.’ We rushed off and got airborne, with Jeff leading. We were vectored up. When we broke cloud, I couldn’t believe it. All I could see was five of us and a damned huge formation of German aircraft. You looked at them and thought, ‘Where the devil do we begin?’ There was a cloud of bombers, with 109s wheeling above them. Jeff led us away to gain height to go into the attack. We picked up a German straggler and shot him down. Then we climbed up again, but the amazing thing was the sky could be absolutely full one minute and the next minute there was not a thing in sight, and that was the situation then. We were vectored around, looking, but didn’t see another thing and eventually returned to base. When we landed, the Vickers limo was waiting and we went off to London like a shot!
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Flying Officer John Bisdee
We had three Americans in our squadron — Red Tobin, Andy Mamedoff and Shorty Keogh. Shorty Keogh was an ex-professional parachute jumper and barnstormer. These three had volunteered for the Finnish air force when Finland was fighting the Russians in 1939, but Finland packed in. They had then volunteered for the French air force, but the French packed in. They had got to Bordeaux, I think, where they were taken pity on by the skipper of an English freighter and brought back to England.
At this stage, America was neutral and England wasn’t awfully keen on taking Americans into our armed forces. There was an enormous number of Germanophiles in America at the time. They would have made hay with the idea that the American boys were being subordinated to the dreaded British.
But these three were really down and out in England. They went to drown their sorrows in a pub in London, where they met an air commodore one night. They explained their sad predicament to him and he said, ‘Get in touch with me tomorrow.’ They got in touch with him the following morning. By noon, they had been commissioned in the Royal Air Force and sent off with some money to buy uniforms and that kind of thing. I don’t know whether they did any training before they came to our squadron. They must have had some. They were a grand lot, very picturesque characters. Red Tobin, a long, gangly chap, used to dash out to his aircraft with his long legs, shouting, ‘Saddle her up boys. I’m riding!’
Shorty Keogh was four feet ten inches. He was so short, we had to give him two lots of cushions on his seat, so he could see out of the cockpit. But they all did very well in the squadron. They were fine pilots. Towards the end of the battle, they all went off to Eagle Squadron — the American squadron that was formed here in England at that time. All three of them were later killed.
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Pilot Officer David Crook
Shorty was last seen spinning into the sea near Flamborough Head during a chase after a Heinkel. Red crashed behind Boulogne, fighting like hell against a crowd of Messerschmitt 109s, while Andy hit a hill in bad weath
er and was killed. As Red once remarked with the usual grin, pointing to the wings on his tunic, ‘I reckon these are a one-way ticket, pal.’
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Flying Officer Jeffrey Quill
I didn’t want to stay at being a Spitfire test pilot when the war began hotting up. I went to see Air Vice Marshal Keith Park and persuaded him to post me to 65 Squadron. The squadron commander was killed the day I arrived. We were based at Rochford, but went every day to Manston, right down on the southeastern tip of England, so close to the Germans across the Channel that we never spent the night at Manston. It would have been easy for them to pull a surprise raid on us. We’d fly to Rochford. But we operated out of Manston and sometimes got beaten up there, often on take-off.
When the bloody great bombing raids started forming up over northern France, with their fighter escorts taking off from different fields to join them, our Controllers would know what was happening. The radar would pick them up. We’d sit at dispersal at Manston and the telephone would ring. The Controller — they were usually very chatty — would say, ‘There’s something big brewing up over Abbeville, so be ready.’ Sometimes they’d tell us to get into our cockpits. We’d get all strapped in and be ready to take off. Taking off from Manston, we were too close to the incoming raids to go climbing out to sea for a direct interception. We’d never have been able to get enough height. So we’d take off and climb inland before we could get into position to turn back and attack from above. We got fed up with this. We used to ask, ‘Why the bloody hell do we have to start from here?’ They’d say, ‘You’ve got to be at Manston because if we start pulling the fighters out of southeast England, local people might think we’re evacuating the area.’ Public morale was a big factor in keeping us there. In fact, when we went in to land at Manston around 5.30 in the morning, we were instructed to fly low over the nearby towns and give them a jolly good buzz. I don’t know what people thought about being awakened by the noise at that time of day, but at least they knew we were there. If it had suddenly ceased, with all the invasion scare going on, it would have been bad.