Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

  There was another reason why we stayed at Manston. The air force said, ‘This is our airfield. We’re bloody well not going to be moved from it by the ruddy Germans.’ People weren’t going to be pushed around. But for us, tactically, it would have been better to be based further back. This was especially true when it came to the squadron forming up after take-off, which was quite a business. It involved a lot of chatter on the R/T. Somebody might get left behind. And the squadron leader got a bit tetchy because people weren’t forming up more quickly, so we thought it was much better to form up in squadron formation on the ground. When the squadron commander said go, we all went. We took off in formation and got back into combat position once we were in the air. It was quicker and neater — when we had the time — but it was more unwieldy, particularly when you were on the ground.

  That’s how we got comprehensively dive bombed while we were still stationary one day. We were waiting there, all engines running, everybody watching the squadron commander, waiting for the whole thing to start rolling. The next thing we knew we were being bombed by 110s. We all, of course, opened up and took off and to hell with the formation! We were very lucky to survive. Everybody got up except one. He was a New Zealander called Wigg. He was a bit slow getting started. Perhaps his engine was slightly on the choke situation. A bomb dropped right behind him and the blast from the bomb, coming from behind, blew his propeller around backwards and stopped his engine. He nipped out of the cockpit and had to run like hell to get clear. Bloody bombs were dropping all over. It was funny because he was usually a deliberate, slow-moving sort of chap who’d never hurry for anything.

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  Pilot Officer Dave Glaser

  Wigg would never run. When we’d all rush out for the scramble, Wigg would come strolling out eating an apple. On the ground, his main interest was digging his ditch. He was always digging that ditch. Every time we landed, he’d be back digging a few more spadefuls of earth. In the end, that thing was so deep that when he was in it, still digging, you couldn’t see him. All you’d see was the shovel suddenly appearing and earth flying in all directions. He wanted that ditch to be ready for him to get into if he was on the ground when the Germans strafed the airfield.

  One day, a Dornier, shot up and looking for a field on which to crash land, headed for our base at Rochford. We were coming back from an interception when Nicky Nicholas saw it, tucked in behind it and fired away. All that chap apparently wanted to do was get the damned thing on the ground before he lost control of it and he finally managed a belly landing on the field. When he got down, all defensive guns — machine-guns and things — on the base opened up at him. One of the Germans had started to get out of the plane, but he shot back in again. The stuff was flying in all directions. Wigg had landed by then and was getting out of his plane. When the shooting started, he jumped into his ditch. It was so deep by then that he sprained an ankle.

  Eventually, the shooting subsided and the chaps came out of the Dornier just as a local copper arrived on his bicycle, wanting to know what was going on, because when Nicholas had been trying to shoot down that Dornier, a bullet had gone through the billiard table at the village police station and they weren’t very pleased about that.

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  Sergeant Dick Kilner

  We’d been told at Manston that a raid was on the way and to get ready to scramble to meet it. We were in our cockpits. I found that my oxygen bottle hadn’t been replaced. It was empty, so I told someone to get a fresh one for me. If you were going to 30,000 feet, you needed oxygen. Just then, one of the groundcrewmen standing on my wing looked up and saw the enemy aircraft already coming right for us out of the sun. All the groundcrew disappeared down a dug-out. I thought the best thing was for me to do the same. I hopped out of my aircraft and ran like bloody hell. I’m sure my athletic club would have been very proud of me for the speed I got to that dug-out.

  It was a frightening quarter of an hour there. Some of our planes were destroyed on the ground. We could hear the bombs coming down, louder and louder. We just waited for one to land on us. When the raid was over and we came out, we could see a line of bombs had dropped and one had dropped on either side of our dug-out.

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  Pilot Officer Richard Jones

  One day when we were at Hawkinge near Dover and were scrambled, I raced for my aircraft, hopped in, but it just wouldn’t start. I was left behind as the others took off. No sooner were they gone than German bombers swept in and the aerodrome was bombed. There was only one very small shelter in the area where I was. And there were four or five times more people around than could fit into it. Everybody rushed for the entrance. When I got in, I was quickly pushed to the back. We all were being pushed to the back and out the rear by people pushing in from the front. We came out the back and tore around to the front and pushed our way in again. I think we all went around about four times while the aerodrome was being bombed. It’s funny now. It wasn’t at the time.

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  Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone

  Westhampnett, the satellite field where we landed when we came south from Scotland in mid-August, was just three large fields knocked into one. There were no airfield buildings at all on it. The place still looked like three fields. You could see the marks where they’d taken the hedges down. A windsock flew at one corner and there were a few Nissen huts. That’s all there was, aside from a burning Messerschmitt as we flew in and, in the middle of the airfield, a Hurricane lying on its back.

  We’d been told we were coming south for only a short period, so we hadn’t brought much stores with us. It was a blow when the station commander at Tangmere, who was in charge of Westhampnett too, came across to see me and said, ‘By the way, I hope you brought plenty of stores with you. We’ve got nothing but Hurricane squadrons, so we don’t carry any Spitfire spares.’ Middle Wallop was the nearest airfield that had Spitfires operating from it. I rang the Sector commander, a chap named Roberts, and told him our predicament. I asked him if he could let us have a few spares to keep us going. He said, ‘Certainly. Send over a lorry and we’ll see what we can do for you.’ We were jolly busy and I couldn’t spare an officer, so I picked a young corporal, Murphy by name, a tough little Glasgow Keelie, and three other chaps, and sent them over, with Murphy in charge. It was the first time he’d been in charge of anything. He was cock-a-hoop.

  I gave them strict instructions. They were not to dally. They were to get there, make themselves known, get as much spares as they could and come straight back. They were two miles short of the airfield at Middle Wallop when it came under attack. They suddenly saw the German aircraft diving on the field. Murphy stopped the lorry and got all his chaps out and into a ditch. A Messerschmitt 110 flashed over their heads, on fire, and disappeared over a hill and crashed. Suddenly they saw a parachute coming down close to them. They rushed over, collared the German, tied him up and put him in the back of the lorry.

  By this time, the raid was over, but Middle Wallop was in an awful mess. Hangars were on fire. People were running about. They drove to the guardroom. All they found was one young and very frightened airman who’d been left in charge when everyone else had gone off to help with the fires and the damage. This young airman wasn’t very keen to take charge of the German, who was getting angry about being tied up. But a sergeant appeared, took charge of the prisoner, locked him up in the cells and told our fellows how to get to the equipment station.

  They drove off with fires going on all around them, backed up to the stores section and, just as at the guardroom, found that all the senior people had gone off to help. They had left the place in charge of a couple of inexperienced airmen who didn’t know our fellows weren’t from their station. When they heard they’d come for Spitfires spares, they began bundling the stuff out. We got enough stuff almost to build two new Spitfires, including wings and everything. We were delighted. When I rang up Roberts to thank him, he said, ‘What for?’ I said, ‘All the stuff you gave us.’ He was amazed. N
obody in charge had even known Murphy had been there. Roberts said, ‘That’s all right. We’ll write it off against the bombing raid.’

  We needed those spares. Things got busy for us very quickly and stayed busy. We were off at lunch one day when the phone went and we were told, ‘Get airborne!’ It wasn’t, ‘Come to readiness,’ or anything nice and calm like that. We just rushed out, ran across to our aircraft willy-nilly. Spitfires were taking off from all corners of the airfield. Why there were no collisions, I’ll never know. But we all got airborne while Stukas began diving down on the base. Some of them were pulling out of their dives right in front of us. One of my chaps — Finlay Boyd — he’d just taken off. He hadn’t even started to pull his wheels up when a Stuka dived right in front of him. He just turned his firing button and blew this aircraft into the ground. It just exploded in front of him. That was his first big action. He was so shaken, he just continued to circuit and landed back at Westhampnett. He hadn’t even pulled his wheels up. The rest of us had meantime got together as best we could. We were in a tremendous melee of aircraft. We just fired blindly at everything that was nearby. We got a fair bag that day and, amazingly, no casualties ourselves.

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  Sylvia Yeatman

  My husband, who was engineer officer at the Bomber Command base at Detling, was due for leave. He kept saying he couldn’t possibly take it, in view of what was happening. I said, ‘You must. It’s probably the last chance you’ll get for a long time.’ So I bought tickets for sleepers on the night train to Scotland and we set off to Argyllshire to stay with my cousin, taking along bikes and dog and all. Just as we arrived, a message came through. My husband was recalled. No reason given. We went right back to London by train from Glasgow. I went to stay with my sister-in-law while he went on to Detling to see why he was recalled. He told me he’d send a coded message to tell me what it was about. He said if he’d made a mess of things, he’d say in the message, ‘I lost my uniform.’ If it was the aerodrome, he’d say, ‘I’ve lost my vest.’ If it was a general recall, he’d say something else — I can’t remember what that was.

  I went out to dinner. When I came back, my sister-in-law said, ‘I’ve had the most extraordinary message from Harry. He said he’s lost his vest but he’s really left his string jersey on the train.’

  When I got to Detling, I realized he wouldn’t have been there at all if I hadn’t taken him off to Scotland. The Germans had bombed it. The CO had been killed. The Ops Room was gone. His office, his bedroom, everything had gone.

  Detling was a silly place to have an airfield. We were up on a hill. When the Germans started bombing it, they had things all their own way. We used to call the German attacks our medicine — they came at eleven in the morning, three in the afternoon and seven in the evening. Of course, they didn’t always come as regularly as that, but they did raid us often. My husband had a lot of fights with the Air Ministry, which he finally won, to take his men down and get them workshops in Maidstone, so they could get on with the job of repairing damaged bombers. They couldn’t get much done at Detling. They were always going in the bunkers during the raids.

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  Flight Lieutenant Tony Miller

  While we were working at Tangmere Aerodrome on developing airborne radar that would be effective, we had a system in case there was an enemy raid. If the tannoy announced a raid was imminent, we would rush to the hangar and allocate crews for the Blenheims we used for experimenting. The idea was to get them off the ground and out of the way as soon as possible, so they wouldn’t be damaged. One day, I went to the mess at lunchtime and there was Bing Cross, a pilot who’d been in the Norwegian campaign. He’d been on the aircraft carrier Victorious when it was sunk and he’d been in hospital. I bought us drinks and just then the tannoy sounded off. I said, ‘Hang on to my beer. I’ll be right back.’

  I got down to the crew room and was saying to the others, ‘You fly with so-and-so. And you fly with so-and-so,’ when somebody shouted, ‘Good God, they’re here!’ There was an awful explosion and all hell broke loose. It was Junkers 87s. Down they came, one after the other, loosing off thousand pound bombs. Several landed near us. There was so much bloody noise. Debris was flying in the air, coming down through our tin roof. I nipped out of the crew room and pressed up against the earthen revetment outside. But I was showered with debris anyway.

  The raid didn’t last very long. When I looked around, I saw our CO, Willy ‘The Wasp’ Chamberlain, had leapt into one of our experimental Blenheims and was trying to start the thing, to take off and get it out of the way in case the Germans came back. I jumped up on the wing beside him and pointed to the tail of the aircraft, half of which was now missing.

  So much of our experimenting depended on using electrical apparatus so we were more or less limited on the ground to the length of a long trailing cable you could feed out from the hangar where the electrical supply was. So all our aircraft were unhappily closely clustered together, which meant we copped it fairly well that day.

  I spotted an airman on top of a flat roof of one of the nearby hangars. He didn’t look well. I nipped up a ladder and saw he was shell-shocked. He had apparently kept on firing his gun at the raiders right through the raid, though thousand-pound bombs had been landing close to him. I said, ‘Let’s go down.’ He took no notice. I swore some good round oaths at him which finally penetrated and he came to and I got him to sick bay.

  Aside from our planes, damage wasn’t too bad on the aerodrome that day. But there were casualties. Some airmen had dived down a trench carrying electrical cables round the station. A bomb landed nearby and the blast travelled down the trench and killed them. Three or four civilian workmen who’d made a run for it to get out of danger were also killed by a bomb. Bing Cross, whom I’d left with our drinks, was gone when I got back to the mess. It was four years before I saw him again.

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  Squadron Leader Peter Devitt

  As squadron leader, it was my job to write letters of bereavement to the parents of the pilots in my squadron who were killed. And you got parents coming down to see you when you’d been fighting all day and were dead tired. The officer of the watch would ring through and say, ‘We’ve got Mr so-and-so here and he’d like to see you.’ You had to go down and go through the whole thing with them, and tell them how it had happened. That was the worst part, though on the whole the parents took it well.

  One of my flight commanders got shot down fairly early on and his wife was down there. She was about to have a baby. I had to go and explain to her what had happened.

  Everybody was expecting it anyway. I expected it too. I refused to have my wife there. If she had been there, she would have known when I was taking off, flying up, this that and the other. She might panic and ring up and bother people when they were busy. Anyway, I had a small son and she had to look after him. She had a sister whose husband was away in the navy, so they found a place to live together.

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  Flight Lieutenant Frederick Rosier

  The really good fighter pilot had a gift. He could scan the skies, take it all in, know how long he had to do something, and then do it. Very few people had that gift. I think I was an exceptional pilot in peacetime, but I didn’t have that gift. Eyesight was terribly important. You could pick things out long before anyone else. But when you were in the middle of combat, it was the facility to look around and instantly put it all into your mental computer to produce the right answers. Most people who looked around could take in only a certain amount.

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  Pilot Officer Dave Glaser

  There was one chap — McPherson — who, in a scrap, sometimes even when he was right in the middle of it, would shout suddenly to one of us, ‘Look out, there’s one on your tail!’ He was incredible. He was an old regular flight sergeant. He seemed to know what was going on up there all the time.

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  Pilot Officer Bob Kings

  There were a combination of factors which made a success
ful fighter pilot — the ability to fly skilfully, the ability to shoot accurately, and luck. The best pilot in the world with the first two qualifications only had to be unlucky for two or three seconds and somebody behind him would blow him out of the sky. It happened to many aces.

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  Pilot Officer Bobby Oxspring

  Nearly every time you were jumped and had to break sharply to get away, you blacked out. You didn’t lose consciousness, but you lost vision. When you had about three or four ‘G’ on you, your heart couldn’t pump blood to the brain and it affected your eyesight. First there was a grey mist over your vision and, as you increased the ‘Gs’, as you reefed sharply to get away from someone on your tail, you blacked out. It was like being with your eyes open in a dark cellar with no lights on. As soon as you eased off, you could see again, but while it was happening you felt tremendous pressure on your body.

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  Squadron Leader James Leathart

  There was nothing abnormal about being exhausted. It happened to all of us. We were under such pressure. One morning, after a sortie, Johnny Allen fell asleep while eating his breakfast and fell face down into his bacon and eggs. Once, I counted the operational sorties I did in a four-week period during the battle and it came out to eighty-four. Almost all of those involved combat. And I didn’t go up as often as some of my men.