Dogfight

by Adam Claasen

  At 6.20p.m. 65 Squadron, at its forward Manston base, was scrambled to intervene in a Luftwaffe raid on a convoy off Dover. Olive led Yellow Section. Although the enemy aircraft attacking the vessels were nowhere to be seen, he did spy an Me 109 about to attack an inattentive Hurricane in the distance. The Anzac approached the two aircraft from an almost head-on position with two other 65 Squadron pilots in tow. They were too late. The Me 109’s cannon had sheared off the entire tail section of the Hurricane. ‘In an instant,’ recalled Olive, ‘the pilot popped out of the cockpit like a cork from a champagne bottle.’[26] Either the enemy pilot had not seen the trio of Spitfires or thought he could outrun them because he then turned for France, flying in a straight line. At full throttle the Anzac overhauled the German fighter in a downhill run to Calais at close to 450 mph. ‘When his wings filled the gun sight ... I opened fire. Pieces, large and small came off him and flashed dangerously close.’ Olive gave him a full sixteen-second burst of his ammunition and the Messerschmitt with its pilot ‘knifed into the water’. It was a bitter-sweet moment. On the one hand Olive had secured his first victory, but on the other he had killed another airman. In his memoirs he recorded, that after unloading the entire magazine of the Spitfire into the German, he ‘turned away in disgust’.[27]

  Killing

  In fact, Olive had been deceiving himself since he had first seen flying in France. When he looked back on the considerable action he had seen over Dunkirk in the previous month, he asked himself: ‘Had I destroyed any [Me] 109s? Several of the boys of my vintage were already claiming double figures.’ His low claim rate was simply due to the fact he did not want to admit to taking someone else’s life.[28]

  Unlike many pilots, Olive had pre-war experience with Germans. In late 1937, he and a South African from 65 Squadron secured leave to ski and hike in Austria. The two colonials spent most of their time with Austrian guides of similar age to themselves in the enchanting mountains of the Tyrol; friendships were struck up and conversation turned to politics and National Socialism. The guides were sympathetic to Germany’s Hitler and the prospects for Austria, and dismissed the likelihood of war. Twelve months later Olive was able to revisit Austria, but everything had changed with the German take-over: the Anschluss. His entry to Austria was marred by the Nazi customs officer, a ‘coarse-looking brute’ in jackboots who ‘spat some remark to me in German I didn’t understand’ and everywhere ‘floated the Nazi Swastika’.

  His friends of only a year ago had lost their happy-go-lucky outlook on life and would only talk politics in the most guarded terms. Some were almost panicky and now considered war inevitable. ‘Hitler is going to try to conquer the world,’ one noted desperately. ‘It is too late for us. We are already conquered. The National Socialists are incredibly evil. If they conquer the world, civilisation will go back to another Dark Age.’ Olive compared this trip with his first Austrian sojourn just a year earlier and observed that the ‘people were the same, at least the ones I had mixed with were, but a brutal element had been mobilised to terrify the people into abject compliance with the slightest whim of the new ruling class’. During the Battle of Britain the thoughtful Queenslander wrestled with his moral qualms:

  Those German fighter pilots I knew from my skiing days barely a year ago were close to me and I had no pleasure, only distress, at the thought that some of them may well have been my victims. The thought plagued me considerably. I found I could take no pleasure in it at all. Yet I had no doubt of the necessity to win the war.[29]

  Richard Hillary was another pilot who rationalised his actions along ideological lines, but overlaid this with a veneer of reasoned professionalism and pragmatism. His views were similarly coloured by his pre-war contact with Germans but he was, in contrast to Olive, far less sympathetic. In 1938, at the Rhineland river town of Bad Ems as part of the Oxford rowing team, the Australian expatriate had been none too impressed with the attitude of the Germans he met at the General Göring’s Prize Fours. The Oxonians deliberately displayed a cultivated indifference to the opposition and even the race itself, much to the annoyance of the German competitors.

  Shortly before the race we walked down to the changing-rooms to get ready. All five German crews were lying flat on their backs on mattresses, great brown stupid-looking giants, taking deep breaths. It was all very impressive. I was getting out of my shirt when one of them came up and spoke to me, or rather harangued me, for I had no chance to say anything. He had been watching us, he said, and could only come to the conclusion that we were thoroughly representative of a decadent race. No German crew would dream of appearing so lackadaisical if rowing for England: they would train and they would win. Losing this race might not appear very important to us, but I could rest assured that the German people would not fail to notice and learn from our defeat.[30]

  During the penultimate race the English were five boat-lengths adrift of the leader when someone spat on them. ‘It was a tactical error,’ recalled Hillary. His crew won the race by two-fifths of a second, much to the chagrin of the German crews as they watched the languid Brits hold aloft the trophy. Consequently, when the war came, Hillary felt little affinity for the German pilots, and the war itself offered, at least for those from the university squadrons, the opportunity to show they were a ‘match for Hitler’s dogmafed youth’.[31]

  In spite of his political disdain for his National Socialist adversaries, when he finally made his first kill Hillary, like many of his contemporaries, felt he was merely doing his job as a professional fighter pilot. In his best-selling book chronicling his combat experiences, Hillary shared his thoughts in the wake of shooting down his first German:

  My first emotion was one of satisfaction, satisfaction at a job adequately done, at the final logical conclusion of months of specialised training ... I had a feeling of the essential rightness of it all. He was dead and I was alive; it could so easily have been the other way around; and that would somehow have been right too. I realised in that moment just how lucky a fighter pilot is. He has none of the personalised emotions of the soldier, handed a rifle and bayonet and told to charge. He does not even have to share the dangerous emotions of the bomber pilot who night after night must experience that childhood longing for smashing things. The fighter pilot’s emotions are those of the duellist—cool, precise, impersonal. He is privileged to kill well. For if one must either kill or be killed, as now one must, it should, I feel, be done with dignity. Death should be given the setting it deserves; it should never be a pettiness; and for the fighter pilot it never can be.[32]

  In spite of Hillary’s clinical analysis, many other pilots who came face-to-face with their victims’ mutilated and burnt bodies in an English or French field were less enamoured of the impersonal ‘duellist’ analogy.

  When, back in November 1939, Cobber Kain confronted the wreckage of his widely celebrated first victory over France, the young Kiwi was left with no doubt of the bloody nature of war, even for fighter pilots. What was left of the crew was scattered though an orchard and around a church, with two fire-scorched skulls adorned with the remnants of aviation headgear. His biographer Michael Burns wrote that the ‘euphoria in the kill evaporated when he saw the reality of war close-up ... and the illusion was gone’.[33] Newspaper reporters recalled that Kain was visibly distressed. On the back of a photograph, which he sent to a family friend, of himself standing amid the wreckage, he scrawled ‘Looking a little sobered after viewing my 1st victim...’

  Few of the Anzacs would feel the same hatred for their enemy as some of the Continental pilots, especially the Poles, who had not only suffered the indignity of a German invasion but the great loss of civilian life that followed. Nevertheless, personal loss could inspire a strong desire to ‘even the score’ or deliver retribution. Farnborough-based test pilot Arthur Clouston lost his brother to the Germans and waited for the opportunity to strike back. In September, the sirens blared and a mad rush was made for the fighters. The New Zealander won the race to a Spit
fire and once aloft found a cluster of bombers retreating after unloading their armaments. Clouston latched onto a Me 110, only to have a large bomber pass directly in front of him. A long burst from his eight machine guns resulted in the aircraft rolling over and disintegrating on impact with a local farmer’s field. The temporarily forgotten Me 110 soon felt the sting of Clouston’s skill and ire; the rear gunner was killed and the starboard engine suffered heavy damage. Exhilarated, he returned to base feeling much better having ‘paid the debt’ for his brother.[34]

  Observing the results of the conduct of some German pilots turned a number of the RAF fight pilots quickly away from the idea that this aerial struggle was an honourable contest between gentlemen. During the fall of France, pilots of the AASF had been disgusted by the Luftwaffe’s deliberate use of Stuka dive bombers on civilians fleeing the front lines.[35] Calculated to slow the advance of Allied counter-operations, the attacks on the refugees left a trail of dead civilian men, women and children that dispelled any illusions that this air war was a replay of the chivalrous exploits of the Great War. Thereafter, they saw it as their duty to rid the world of Hitler and National Socialism, one Luftwaffe pilot at a time.

  Attitudes also hardened towards the enemy when German pilots were deemed to be not playing within the rules of the game. Spurdle was one of the few pilots to be confronted by just such a situation and it came to define his attitude to war and the enemy. In a vertical dive at over 600 mph chasing an Me 109, he lost his starboard wing. He baled out at 20,000 feet and opened his parachute. He immediately found himself enmeshed in tracer fire as he was attacked by a Luftwaffe airman.

  Something whining shrilly streamed past and I saw strange twisted lines drawn as into infinity. More of them and weird rushing sounds. I appeared to be the centre of a mad, wind-blown spider’s web. Amazed, I heard the crackling, tearing sound of cannon fire like a ripping canvas, and then a high whistling shriek. Something big and black tore past me—a [Me] 109.

  It climbed right in front of me, turning for another go. I cursed and wriggled frantically in the harness trying to draw my revolver.[36]

  Fortunately, the handgun-wielding Spurdle did not have to go one-on-one with the Messerschmitt, as two Spitfires entered the fray.[37] The Kiwi had a grandstand view of the fight as the ‘Jerry staggered, slipped and fell, crippled and smoking into a wood’. ‘Served the bastard right!’ thought Spurdle.

  After a handful of days of respite in London he returned to the mess to find pilots still fuming about the barbaric Luftwaffe pilot firing upon the defenceless New Zealander. Spurdle was having none of it and had drawn his own typically forthright conclusions from the frightening incident: ‘You’re nuts! The Hun was right! I’d do exactly the same if over their territory ... He’s only going to come up again and it could be my turn the next time.’ He stated that, ‘I’d shoot up an ambulance or their bloody women to help win the war!’[38] Few pilots, Anzac or otherwise, would have agreed, but most had not been shot at while hanging defenceless in a parachute.

  Clearly, the rationale for fighting and killing the enemy differed from pilot to pilot. While some argued that their actions were part of a crusade to destroy Nazism, others rested in the role assigned them of highly skilled professionals doing their job. Either way, a pilot could not be expected to have a great deal of sympathy for an enemy who had already killed some of his best mates and was doing everything in his power to do the same to him. All pilots agreed that air fighting was a zero-sum game. Returning to the squadron mess holding a trophy collected from the remains of a wreck—a Mauser pistol—Kain was asked by reporters how he felt about the Germans he had just killed. He responded, in a slightly breaking voice, ‘Well it was either them or me.’[39]

  CHAPTER 4

  Life and Death

  On 24 July, a series of formidable attacks was launched on the convoys. The Germans first dispatched heavily escorted bombers against a convoy on the threshold of the Thames Estuary and one in the Dover Straits. In the thick of it was Deere commanding a flight which included Gray. The first sortie of the day took place soon after breakfast and, although they disrupted an attack on the convoy, no enemy machines were knocked out.

  Their second mission took place at midday when 54 Squadron was sent rushing forward to intercept raids at 7000 feet.[1] Deere soon spotted the largest formation of enemy machines he had seen: eighteen Dornier bombers and a disturbingly high number of fighters. In typical Luftwaffe fashion, the Me 109s were staircased up to about 5000 feet above Deere’s position. The convoy—easily seen in the distance—was the unsuspecting target of the Luftwaffe bombers. In terms of self-preservation the best option was to attack the fighters, because to assault the bombers first was to leave oneself open to an unpleasant counter-attack from the covering Me 109s. Nevertheless, the squadron’s first duty was to destroy, or at least waylay, the Dorniers. The Anzac ordered his flight to strike.

  Taking advantage of our height above the enemy bombers to work up a high overtaking speed, thus making it difficult for the protecting fighters to interfere with our initial run in, we turned to attack. A momentary buffeting as I hit the enemy bombers’ slipstream, a determined juggling with the control column and rudder, a brief wait for the range to close, and the right-hand bomber received the full impact of my eight Brownings.[2]

  At which point the Luftwaffe fighters descended from behind and a ‘terrific dogfight’ ensued, scrawled Gray in his flight logbook. Deere, in his after-action report, noted that although most of his shots were wild bursts at aircraft flashing past him, he did manage ‘one decent long burst at a [Me] 109 at close range and he went down with glycol pouring from the machine.’[3] It was his first success in the Battle of Britain proper. For both New Zealanders the dogfight ended with the sky devoid of all machines. ‘Suddenly, the sky was clear and I was alone,’ recalled Deere, ‘one moment the air was a seething cauldron of Hun fighters, and the next it was empty.’ It struck the two of them as a strange phenomenon, but was not uncommon.

  Gray turned his machine for home when he heard a pilot across the wireless calling for directions to Hornchurch. It was evident that the airman had become disorientated in the mêlée. Confirming the dilemma, a fighter flashed past Gray’s nose heading in the ‘wrong direction’ to France. Only too eager to aid a fellow pilot in need, the Anzac changed course and sent his Spitfire in pursuit. If he could overtake the errant pilot Gray could then guide him home. As he closed with the fighter, he thought the Spitfire was somewhat unusual looking and then realised that it was in fact an enemy Me 109. At which point the German threw the machine to starboard, exposing a dark cross emblazoned across the fuselage. The machine was now vulnerable to a deflection shot and burst into flames as the pilot opened the cockpit canopy to bale out.[4]

  Death and Grief

  Just before lunch the following day, 54 Squadron was once again sent south to Manston. Two hours later both flights were airborne; Deere was in A Flight and Gray in B, led by Englishman George Gribble. This second flight of five Spitfires caught sight of Ju 87 dive-bombers flying from the direction of Cap Gris Nez—the closest point on the French coast to Dover, barely 20 miles distant. Gray was keen to attack the Stukas, which were rapidly gaining a reputation as easy pickings for Fighter Command’s Hurricanes and Spitfires. The flight immediately engaged the forty or so Ju 87s.

  The first to fall was at the hands of Flight Lieutenant Basil ‘Wonky’ Way, of Somerset. Way was one of the squadron’s most accomplished pilots and had been the recipient of the Groves Memorial Flying Prize in training for the best all-round pilot of the course. However, in an instant the situation changed. ‘Watch out, Blue One, [Me] 109s coming in from above —hundreds of them,’ yelled Gribble over the radio.[5] Gray’s after-action report reckoned they numbered sixty. The odds were impossible, as the Kiwi was engaged by about a dozen Me 109s in a fifteen-minute dogfight that ranged between 10,000 and 19,000 feet. He could hardly ‘get in a burst’ because, in a great example of Kiwi unde
rstatement, he was ‘rather outnumbered’.[6] During his febrile manoeuvres, Gray somehow managed to hit one fighter which he saw roll over, apparently out of control.

  In the meantime, Deere, who had been denied permission from control to aid his fellow squadron members, was forced to listen to the unfolding drama via the frantic radio chatter. The dogfight reached its crescendo with Gribble barking urgently over the radio, ‘Break, Wonky, BREAK.’ Gray saw a Spitfire spinning out of control. Gribble’s voice cut through the static, this time in half-sobbing anger: ‘Damn and blast this bloody war.’[7] Basil Way had been killed.

  For Gray the death of Way was just the most recent in a series of losses that stretched back to November 1939. The list included his brother, Kenneth; John Kemp, one of his very best New Zealand friends; John Allen, a favoured colleague; and now the popular ‘Wonky’ Way. Ken Gray had entered the service ahead of his twin brother as a bomber pilot. With the April 1940 German invasion of Scandinavia, Ken’s unit was shipped north from Driffield to Kinloss, Scotland, to fly missions over Norway. In the course of these operations Colin contacted his older sibling in order to share some leave together. Ken was delivering a bomber from Kinloss to Driffield and arranged to pick Colin up at another airfield as he flew south. His brother never appeared. ‘It seemed such a cruel twist of fate that a skilful and experienced pilot ... should lose his life in such circumstances,’ recalled a stunned Colin.[8]

  The loss of Kemp in the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ on 19 July hit Gray particularly hard as the Wellingtonian had been on the same England-bound voyage in 1938 and they became fast friends. In November 1939, Kemp was posted to 54 Squadron as the third New Zealander alongside Gray and Deere, only to be quickly shunted sideways to the Defiant-equipped 141 Squadron. Gray was only too well aware that Kemp was ill-suited to the shift and, in the light of 54 Squadron’s losses sustained over Dunkirk, made a case for the twenty-five-year-old’s return. The squadron leader put in the paperwork. A foul-up ensued and instead of J.R. Kemp, a J.L. Kemp was delivered. It was ‘the wrong Kemp’, recalled a frustrated Gray.[9] Soon afterwards he received a pleasant surprise in the form of an evening phone call from his good friend, only to learn that Kemp was still untested in battle. On 18 July, in a break in the action, Gray took a short jaunt in a Spitfire to West Malling, Kent, to see his friend: ‘It was the last time I saw him alive.’