Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  After a summer of preparations the storm broke. On 18 November the Eighth Army launched Operation Crusader to relieve Tobruk. For the six weeks of the campaign the RAF had mastery of the skies. The Desert Air Force was now commanded by a brisk, forty-six-year-old New Zealander, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham, whose nickname ‘Maori’ had somehow been mangled to ‘Mary’. Coningham was determined on an effective combination of air power and ground forces. He set up his headquarters next door to that of the army commander, his near-namesake Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham, and their staffs messed together. Co-operation in the air matched the closeness on the ground. Of the twenty-seven squadrons at Coningham’s disposal, sixteen of them were fighter units – fourteen equipped with Hurricanes and Tomahawks and two with the longer-range Beaufighters. Hitherto air support for a major ground action had been thought of as the domain of bombers. But the new generation of fighters showed they could function in much the same way as the Luftwaffe had in the Blitzkrieg, bombing and strafing enemy troops and communications with powerful effect. By the end of the year, after some setbacks, the Eighth Army had pushed Rommel back to Agedabia (modern-day Ajdabiya) on the Gulf of Sirte, well to the West of Tobruk. Operation Crusader was a victory – albeit not a decisive one.

  The stalemate on the ground that followed did not take hold in the air. Fighters and bombers kept up a continuing campaign of harassment. For the fighters it meant regular sweeps looking for targets of opportunity, during which the prospect of an encounter with their Luftwaffe opponents was always present. In the first six months of 1942 Neville Duke of 112 Squadron was constantly embroiled in the action. Duke was the epitome of coolness. He was tall, handsome, a brilliant flyer, whose undoubted enthusiasm for the kill was tempered by a sardonic and easy-going manner. He was brought up in Tonbridge, Kent, not far from the Kenley and Biggin Hill fighter stations. He went on his first ‘flip’ aged ten and was bitten. Thereafter his main ambition was to become a pilot. In June 1940, having been turned down by the Fleet Air Arm, he was accepted by the RAF. In the New Year he bought a three-shilling diary and the entries he kept fairly faithfully thereafter provide us with a privileged glimpse into the thoughts of a lively, civilized young man who went on to become the most successful RAF fighter pilot in the Middle East. He began it in the detached, philosophical tone that suffuses all the entries thereafter: ‘Decided to keep a diary this year . . . I started flying last August. Some of my friends are dead, but many of my other brother pupils will last this war out; perhaps, if I should one day fall, this diary will be of some slight interest to those who will in the future become pilots.’2

  At the end of January 1942, aged barely twenty, Duke was in North Africa, living the life of a front-line pilot flying Kitthawks, operating from desert air strips and based in a tent. By now a counter-attack by Rommel was pushing the British back to the Gazala line. Duke’s entry of Sunday 25 January gives us a flavour of the uncertainty and discomfort of the time: ‘Flew escort for nine Blenheims in the afternoon. They were to bomb any target they could find and it was not until they had wandered all over the desert that they bombed near Agedabia. The road from there to Antelat was packed with Huns and after the bombing the Blenheims went down to 2,000 feet along this road, getting all the AA [anti-aircraft fire] available! I saw three EA [enemy aircraft] take off from Agedabia and as I took a potshot at them, Sgt Leu hit one head-on and shot the wing-tip off. It was seen to go in near Msus.’

  To ‘go in’ was Fighter Boy-speak for screaming down at several hundred miles an hour to collide with the earth in a shattering explosion and eruption of smoke and flame. Duke recorded everything in the same laconic tone. ‘Ground strafing this morning,’ reads the next day’s entry. ‘Hunk led the squadron off before lunch and we started strafing along the Antelat road and up to Msus. I was to stay above the section and attract the AA . . . I went down around Msus and shot up a truck which was seen to catch fire. Got quite a bit of AA fire all to myself.’

  Duke does not disguise the fact that, whatever the dangers, he was thoroughly enjoying what he was doing and despite the subsequent portrayal of the fighting in the Western Desert as a ‘war without hate’ had little time for his enemies, though as this entry shows, human sympathy did sometimes intrude. ‘The squadron has done quite a bit of strafing lately,’ he wrote at the end of the month. ‘It is good sport if gone about the right way . . . It is a terrific thrill to come belting down out of the sun to let rip at the Huns with the .5s [the six heavy-calibre machine guns which the Kittyhawk carried]. To see your bullets making little spurts in the sand in front of a truck and then pull the nose up a bit until the spurts no longer rise and your bullets are hitting home. Pulling out just before you hit the target as the tendency is to be so engrossed . . . that you forget the ground. Then making your escape, taking advantage of every little rise in the ground and dodging the hate thrown up by the swines.’ He finished on a softer note: ‘You can’t help feeling sorry for the Jerry soldier when you ground strafe them. They run, poor pitiful little figures, trying to dodge the spurts of dust racing towards them.’3

  He found encounters with enemy fighters equally exhilarating. On 14 February 1942 the squadron ran into some Italian Macchis and Bredas. ‘A general dogfight started and I enjoyed myself more than I have ever done before. The cloud was just right and we dived down, had a squirt and climbed up into the cloud again.’ Duke ended up joining an Australian Air Force pilot to chase a Macchi, which, ‘after two or three attacks . . . crashed and burst into flames in an army camp where they had been strafing’. For soldiers on the ground, the sight of their tormentors being despatched by friendly aircraft was heartening and the pilots were much appreciated.

  Life in between sorties was trying. Like everyone Duke hated the dust, as well as the rain and wind in winter and the awful heat in summer. The memories of British bases with their flower beds, squash courts and elegant anterooms where white-coated orderlies served pre-luncheon and dinner drinks seemed like distant dreams. Instead they kipped under canvas and ate bully-beef stew and drank tea, heated over petrol fires.

  They relaxed doing what airmen had always done. Duke’s diaries are studded with references to ‘pissys’ on leave in Cairo bars or when a beer wagon made a welcome stop. ‘Golly, what a session it was last night,’ he wrote on 12 March. ‘I faded away at 1.30, but it was still going strong then. I just couldn’t get my glass empty. No sooner had I taken a sip than it was topped up again by some passing, staggering body.’ There was no question of official disapproval, as Duke made clear. He recorded that earlier that day ‘the CO rather put up a “black”. We had been drinking good and hard since lunchtime and at sunset he announced he was going to drop a bomb. He took off and it appears he dropped it on Martuba. He landed and when taxiing in put the machine on its nose! Then at dinner time he was sitting at the head of the table chattering away, and he suddenly disappeared from my sight. I thought I had had one too many, but no. He had gone over backwards and a sepulchral voice from the depths enquired as to the whereabouts of his bloody beer. Oh, yes, it was a good session.’4 It is easy to forget that behind the extremes of experience to which these desert warriors were exposed, in years they were not much more than schoolboys.

  Rommel was down but not out. Mounting a serious offensive, however, depended on his ability to re-equip and reinforce. His supply lines back to his Italian allies were blocked by the island of Malta, which was perfectly strategically placed in the middle of the Mediterranean, halfway between the toe of Italy and the shores of Tripoli. Malta was of paramount importance to both sides. Britain needed to hold it to hang on in the Middle East. The Germans needed to capture or neutralize it if they were to sustain their campaign. An initial attempt had been made to starve and bomb Malta into submission in the first half of 1941. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June, the Luftwaffe had been diverted to the new campaign. Britain took this chance to stockpile supplies and ferry aircraft into Malta, including cannon-armed Hur
ricanes, Blenheims and Beaufighters. Together with the navy’s submarines and destroyers, Malta-based aircraft slashed at the Afrika Korps’s sea communications, so that in the month before Operation Crusader was launched Rommel lost 63 per cent of his expected supplies. Something had to be done. Late in 1941 Luftwaffe units were shifted to Sicily, some from the Eastern Front, to begin a long assault on the island. On New Year’s Day 1942, 200 aircraft under the command of Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring began pounding the Grand Harbour and docks at Valletta, where the British fleet lay. The battle raged through the spring of 1942, by which time the docks had been pounded to rubble and the Luftwaffe had moved on to the RAF bases. The arrival of a small batch of Spitfires in March blunted the German assault for a while, but the respite was temporary and the Germans, supported by the Regia Aeronautica, enjoyed control of the air and, increasingly, the seas around the island.

  Relief came in May when the carriers Wasp and Eagle managed to deliver 140 more Spitfires. In heavy midsummer fighting the RAF whittled away Kesselring’s force so that by the end of June he was down to thirty-six fighters and thirty-four bombers. Among the defenders was one of the most publicized pilots of the war. George Buerling, sallow, tousle-haired and equipped with amazingly sharp blue eyes, had first taken the controls of an aeroplane in his native Canada at the age of thirteen, and at seventeen he was flying solo. When the war began he was desperate to join it, but lacked the academic qualifications to enter the Royal Canadian Air Force. In the summer of 1940 he risked an Atlantic crossing in a convoy and was eventually accepted by the RAF. In the spring of 1941 he was with Fighter Command, taking part in its costly and pointless campaign of cross-Channel sweeps to stir up enemy airfields. After volunteering for overseas service he was posted to 249 Squadron and Malta.

  He arrived there on 9 June, having flown his Spitfire off the deck of the Eagle, and promptly set about creating his own legend. Beurling was one of those men for whom war is a liberation, allowing them a freedom to demonstrate a prowess for which there is no great demand in peacetime. In the summer of 1942 he shot down seventeen Axis aircraft, four of them in a single day.

  Beurling brought brilliance to the business of flying an aeroplane. In the judgement of Percy ‘Laddie’ Lucas, another superb 249 Squadron pilot, ‘he had an instinctive “feel” for an aircraft. He quickly got to know its characteristics and extremes . . . He wasn’t a wild pilot who went in for all sorts of hair-raising manoeuvres, throwing his aircraft all over the sky . . . a pair of sensitive hands gave his flying a smoothness unusual in a wartime fighter pilot.’5

  Beurling’s exceptional eyesight was matched with phenomenal marksmanship and the ability to instinctively calculate the precise amount of lay-off needed for a perfect deflection shot. ‘I never saw Beurling shoot haphazardly at an aircraft which was too far away,’ wrote Lucas. ‘He only fired when he thought he could destroy. Two hundred and fifty yards was the distance from which he liked best to fire. A couple of short, hard bursts from there and that was usually it.’

  Beurling was also ‘highly strung, brash and outspoken’, characteristics which had made him unpopular in Britain. Lucas sensed that his ‘rebelliousness came from some mistaken feeling of inferiority’ and that ‘what Beurling most needed was not to be smacked down but encouraged’ and made to feel part of the team.

  One morning they were sitting at readiness in a dispersal hut on the palm-shaded airfield at Takali in the centre of the island. In the corner lay a half-eaten slice of bully beef, which was being devoured by a swarm of flies. Lucas watched as ‘Beurling pulled up a chair. He sat there, bent over this moving mass of activity, his eyes riveted on it, preparing for the kill. Every few minutes he would slowly lift his foot, taking particular care not to frighten the multitude, pause and thump! Down would go his flying boot to crush another hundred or so flies to death. Those bright eyes sparkled with delight . . . each time he stamped his foot to swell the total destroyed, a satisfied transatlantic voice would be heard to mutter “the goddam screwballs!”’6

  Thus was born the nickname by which he was known thereafter, to his comrades and then, thanks to the publicity that attached to his exploits, the wider world. It fitted him well. ‘Screwball’ Buerling was a strange man, restless, unsocialized and unfitted for normal life. On returning to Britain he was hijacked by the Government’s propaganda machine and sent back to Canada to help with a war bond-selling drive, a job he hated. He found a wife in Vancouver, but the marriage was brief. Back in Britain on operations he failed to add much to his score. When the war finished he was left high and dry. In an attempt to find refuge in the only world in which he felt comfortable, he signed up to fly Mustangs for the Israeli air force. He was killed on his way there, in a crash at the Aeroporto dell’Urbe in the northern suburbs of Rome.

  The long siege of Malta came to an end with Rommel’s defeat at Alamein in November 1942. The battle witnessed the most perfect melding to date of land and air power in the desert war. Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Montgomery, who took command of the Eighth Army in August, was a fervent believer in integration of effort and expressed himself on the subject with his usual, ringing self-assurance: ‘Fighting against a good enemy – and the German is extremely good . . . you cannot operate successfully unless you have the full support of the air. If you do not win the air battle first, you will probably lose the land battle. I would go further. There used to be an accepted term of “army co-operation”. We never talk about that now. The Desert Air Force and the Eighth Army are one . . . If you knit together the power of the Army on the land and the power of the Air in the sky, then nothing will stand against you and you will never lose a battle.’7

  ‘Monty’ and ‘Mary’ set up their headquarters side by side. Rommel’s preparations to break out of the defensive box he had been pushed into at First Alamein were crippled by nine days of bombing. At the battle of Alam el Halfa that followed, waves of Hurricanes, Spitfires and Tomahawks strafed and blasted the Afrika Corps on the ground, turning away only for the bombers to continue the work. They met little opposition from an exhausted, depleted and fuel-starved Luftwaffe as they took lives, smashed up armour and vehicles, made rest impossible and wore down nerves. On 2 September 1942 light bombers delivered what was effectively the battle-winning blow, dropping 112 tons of bombs on the Germans. Rommel folded and the German withdrawal began. The overwhelming strength of the RAF had played a key part in the outcome. Rommel reflected later that ‘anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete control of the air fights like a savage against modern European troops, with the same handicaps and the same chances of success.’8

  The relationship between aeroplanes and soldiers had come a long way in the space of less than thirty years. The air force had moved from being a useful adjunct to military operations to a crucial necessity, and air superiority had become accepted as a prerequisite of victory. When the Eighth Army met the Afrika Korps again at Second Alamein, Monty had overwhelming mastery of the skies to complement the overmatch he enjoyed on the ground, and he had no excuse for not delivering the first great British success of the land war.

  Throughout October 1942 new aircraft flooded in, supplemented by the men and machines of the United States Ninth Air Force. By the time the battle opened on 23 October, the Allied air forces mustered ninety-six squadrons. By its end, the RAF had flown 10,405 sorties, and the Americans 1,181. The Axis air forces managed just over 3,000. Though outnumbered, they could still bite. The Allies lost nearly a hundred aeroplanes against the Germans’ and Italians’ eighty-four.

  Such intensity of air operations was dependent on the matching energy and efficiency of ground crews. Not a single sortie could take place without fitters and riggers preparing the aircraft before it set off, and maintaining and repairing it when it returned. Inevitably, public attention had always focused on the men in the air. The achievements of the men on the ground were as remarkable in their way, and if they did not endure the s
ame hazards, they were often exposed to danger and frequently to hardship. Between the wars maintaining aircraft was largely carried out by the squadrons themselves. The demands of wartime meant a new system was needed and the Air Ministry set up a series of maintenance units at home and abroad.

  Often the arrangements were improvised and unusual. In Egypt the workshops were situated in various suburbs of Cairo. No. 1 Engine Repair Section (ERS) was situated in ‘a rather distasteful slum quarter’, according to Philip Joubert. ‘The pungency of the surrounding atmosphere was almost visible, so intense were the odours, but this had to be endured as the men entered into the spirit of the job and appreciated all it entailed.’ A small nucleus of RAF tradesmen worked alongside Egyptians, Greeks, Cypriots, Palestinians, Jews and Armenians, recruited locally.

  The British presence was not welcomed by the locals and a phalanx of Indian soldiers was needed to protect the mechanics. Personnel came and went in a truck, which had to carry out ‘a number of intricate manoeuvres to dodge the hordes of men, women, children, donkeys, camels, taxis, gharrys . . . in time it was possible to judge reasonably accurately where to expect a shower of filth, garbage, chewed sugar cane and spit as the truck wended its way to the shop. Craftily thrown stones and plenty of abuse announced the point of arrival.’9