by Adam Claasen
Within twenty-four hours, Stewart, another Wellingtonian, was also missing from the officers’ mess. As Deere lamented, at ‘the end of the following day neither Mick nor his compatriot was with us.’ Stewart, a former accounts clerk, had ‘hit the silk’ after his Spitfire took a pounding from an Me 109 and ended up in the drink. The initial rescue launch sent to retrieve him completely failed to locate the rapidly cooling New Zealander. A teeth-chattering forty-five minutes passed, and with all hope nearly gone, he was finally located by another vessel. Suffering from shock and exposure, the battered and bruised Stewart was plucked from the Channel and the rescue craft headed to Dover, but not before being ineffectually strafed by an Me 109.[18] Both men had survived their premature insertion into the battlefield, but others did not.
Irving Smith had been in operations extensively over August and his squadron was reduced to four pilots by 1 September. As the unit prepared to leave the frontline for the relative calm of Digby, replacements were rushed in to fill the yawning gap in fighting strength. The withdrawal north should have been routine and well within the grasp of the new arrivals. However, as the squadron took off, Smith saw one of them veer away and fly straight into a crane. ‘I knew him for only five minutes,’ the New Zealander lamented.[19]
The other factor in Fighter Command’s mounting losses was the transfer in of weaker squadrons from other Groups. At least in units like 54 Squadron, the newcomers had the advantage of battle-hardened pilots like Gray and Deere to lean upon, but when complete new squadrons were inserted into the field of battle they did so at an acute disadvantage. What was extremely concerning to Park was the rising number of squadrons that were being almost massacred in the air. His own research found the culprit in Leigh-Mallory. The commander of 12 Group was holding back some of his more seasoned squadrons and dispatching units with little readiness for battle. Included among these were 266 and 79. The former unit had started the battle with three Anzacs, New Zealanders Richard Trousdale, Williams and Frank Cale from Australia. In a secret RAF report of 26 August, examining Fighter Command losses, it was revealed that the squadron had claimed credit for nine victories for an unacceptably high loss of six pilots, one of whom was Cale. In 79 Squadron it took only three days at Biggin Hill for Tracey to see four of his colleagues disappear.
Park wanted no more of these untested units, and stated that ‘only experienced squadrons be provided when the exchanges are necessary’.[20] The latter squadron was shipped out of the combat area and replenished by a trio of inexperienced Kiwis. Their high casualty rate came about in part because they were still using pre-war formation flying. The men were accomplished airmen, but unfamiliar with combat; the techniques and lessons learnt by pilots such as Olive, who had fought extensively over Dunkirk and in the early phases of the Battle of Britain, had not been widely disseminated. Wedded to outmoded flying methods, the newcomers were easily picked off by battle-hardened Luftwaffe airmen.
Fatigue and Fear
By early September the issue appeared to be nearing a crisis point and two days into the month a report stated that losses were exceeding new arrivals. The rate of loss was nearly 125 a week and Fighter Command squadrons were 150 pilots short of their establishment numbers by the end of August.[21] Squadrons which had an establishment strength of twenty-six pilots were now averaging nineteen. Five days later at a top level RAF meeting it was stated that the Operational Training Units were currently pushing out only 280 fighter pilots a month, while losses for the past four weeks ran to 348 airmen. Park chipped in that the falling numbers of pilots in squadrons meant that remaining airmen were unable to get a breather from the battle and morale was suffering terribly.
Park was well aware of 11 Group’s deteriorating position as he visited frontline airfields. His air logbook bears testament to his prodigious efforts. Over the entire period of the Battle of Britain he flew on no fewer than 31 days, calling into 11 Group airfields on at least 59 occasions.[22] Park felt it was his responsibility to get a first-hand feel for the battle and listen to the men under his command, from ground crews to pilots to station commanders. For their part, the pilots appreciated a leader who understood their craft, listen to their frustrations, and sometimes cut through red tape to achieve in hours what would ordinarily have taken weeks to implement. Nevertheless, all of Park’s considerable industry was unable to rectify the dwindling reserves of pilots and the mind-numbing grind of fighting. Weariness and combat stress had become just as real an adversary as the Me 109 pilots.
Colin Gray during the last three weeks of August had undertaken a total of sixty sorties. Of these he had engaged the enemy on no fewer than sixteen occasions. ‘We were all absolutely dog-tired from the long hours of “readiness” or “availability” from dawn to dusk most days, from repeated encounters with the enemy, and the constant wear on nerves by air raids—including night-time when we should have been resting and recuperating for the next day.’[23] Over the first three days of September, Gray’s logbook documented an additional thirteen sorties of which five involved combat.
Pilots were starting to display symptoms of severe fatigue. As Deere cast his eyes over the men waiting for the next call-up, he observed that the ‘strain had almost reached breaking point’.
The usually good-natured George was quiet and irritable; Colin, by nature thin-faced, was noticeably more hollow-cheeked; Desmond, inclined to be weighty, was reduced to manageable proportions; and I [who] thought I had no way of knowing how I appeared to others, was all on edge and practically jumped out of my skin when someone shouted unexpectedly over the radio. But still we continued to operate—there was no alternative.[24]
Heavily in action, 111 Squadron was racked by losses and burnout. ‘On one of our busy days at Croydon,’ recalled one of the unit’s armourers, ‘we were watching the return of our Hurricanes, and ready to rearm quickly, when we noticed one aircraft landed and taxied a short distance only to stop some way off with the engine still turning over. Thinking the pilot wounded, we dashed over to the aircraft, only to find the pilot ... was leaning forward ... head on his chest and asleep with exhaustion.’[25]
The cruel unrelenting intensity of the period was enough to test the strongest pilot’s resolve and judgement. Both flight commanders in 257 Squadron had been killed in a single day and the replacements found morale in the squadron was way down: ‘They were a bunch of young chaps, only two of them with pre-war experience ... Naturally they were thinking, if these two experienced chaps can be shot down, what sort of chance have we got?’[26] It did not help that the squadron leader was showing signs of what was termed a ‘lack of moral fibre’ (LMF). On their very first mission with the squadron, patrolling at 20,000 feet above Maidstone, an intruder formation was sighted but the commander refused to order an assault, arguing that they had been directed to patrol and that is what they would do until they were instructed otherwise. The transferred airmen ignored the commanding officer and ploughed into the enemy. After a couple of similar episodes, they downed some beers before phoning through to Park to request that he be dumped. Within hours he was gone.
At the height of the battle, Deere suspected a case of LMF. The New Zealander was only too well aware of the ill-effects due to an incident in the early Channel battles in which a young sergeant in the squadron gained a reputation for diving through a formation with guns firing in the general direction of the enemy only to disappear from the field of battle. ‘He’s “yellow” and there’s no getting away from it,’ Gribble had said to the commanding officer. The two New Zealanders, Gray and Deere, agreed that the sergeant in question was endangering morale, the latter suggesting he be transferred out as ‘operationally tired’.[27]
In late August, Deere remembered this incident when another pilot demonstrated a lack of enthusiasm for duty. The loss-plagued unit needed a new section leader and Deere asked Jack Cole. Surprisingly, he was rebuffed: ‘I’d rather not fly again today, Al, I don’t feel well.’
He’s lost his nerv
e, an annoyed Deere thought and shot back tersely, ‘What do you mean, not well? You’re probably just over-tired like the rest of us. I’m sorry but you will have to fly, there’s no one else capable of taking the second section.’
‘If you say so,’ Cole answered abruptly as he turned on his heel.
A few days later, Deere was taken aback to discover that Cole was admitted to hospital with malaria and should have been removed from the field of battle weeks ago. The embarrassed New Zealander visited him and offered his apologies. ‘So, I had been wrong about Jack; he really was ill and not just frightened, as I had smugly supposed,’ admitted a chagrined Deere.[28] Doubtless the Anzac’s false diagnosis was influenced by his own weariness. Fortunately, 54 Squadron was withdrawn from the fight on 3 September.
The Hornchurch diary summed up its efforts:
In the late afternoon, 54 Squadron left us for a period of rest and recuperation at Catterick. During the previous fortnight, they had been bearing the brunt of the work in the Sector for they had to hold the fort while various new squadrons arrived and settled down into the Sector routine. With the exception of two very short breaks, they had been with us continuously during the first year of the war, and in this period had destroyed 92 aircraft.[29]
Alongside others, the two New Zealanders had done much to carry the squadron through its darkest days. Both men were prodigious fighter pilots. Deere was not only one of the squadron’s leading aces with five confirmed kills and a further three probables and one damaged since 10 July, but clearly one of its leaders.[30] Even ignoring probables and damaged enemy aircraft, Gray’s remarkable run of successes firmly placed him in the record books for the battle as he accounted for fifteen and one shared. However, the determination of the men from the antipodes was not without it limits.
When the replacement 41 Squadron arrived, its pilots were taken aback by the bedraggled collection of pilots shipping out. The New Zealanders and their 54 Squadron colleagues had barely slept in a week and were eager to depart. When talking with Deere after the Battle of Britain, the replacement wing commander later recalled ‘and you, Al, with your bandaged head and plastered wrist were an unnerving sight to our new pilots who hadn’t tasted combat. They wondered what had hit them, or was about to hit them.’[31] As the battle raged on, Deere and Gray passed on the baton to another Anzac: Australian Pat Hughes.
Australian Ace
Contemporary photographs reveal a man with a strong jaw, piercing eyes and good looks. Hughes looked the very image of a fighter pilot. As a young man at Fort Street Boys’ High, Haberfield, Sydney, he had been a very good footballer and swimmer. Intelligent and inquisitive, as a young man Hughes had been an avid aircraft modeller and known for constructing crystal radio sets, before graduating and moving into a clerk’s position with a local jeweller. His RAAF Point Cook cadetship in early 1936 was followed by a short service commission with the RAF. When war broke out he already had over two years of flying with 64 Squadron before being transferred to 234. He was fiercely proud of his homeland and Point Cook training, and was another who insisted on wearing his dark RAAF uniform rather than switch to the lighter blue of the RAF. Like many airmen of the time, he had a dog, dubbed affectionately ‘Flying Officer Butch’, who on occasion flew with his master in non-combat flights.
Although only twenty-three years of age, he seemed older to his fellow pilots and soon slipped into the vacuum created by the unit’s aloof squadron leader, a man in his mid-thirties, who seldom flew and was devoted to the methods of the inter-war era. Hughes, as leader of A Flight, found himself the de facto commander of the entire unit. ‘Hughes was the one who taught me everything in the air,’ one of the squadron’s airmen recalled later, ‘We respected him, listened to him ... He was the real power behind the squadron.’[32] Under his informal leadership of 234, he was able to nurture inexperienced pilots and was often the voice of calm in the heat of battle.
On one occasion during the Kanalkampf, one the squadron’s two Polish pilots, Sergeant Jozef Szlagowski, was disoriented in heavy fog and running on fumes. Panic-stricken, he yelled the few relevant English words he knew down the radio. Hughes’ reassuring voice was the first to respond and brought a measure of calm to the sergeant. The machine ran out of fuel, but fortuitously the fog broke and he was able to make a forced landing in a local field. Hughes ‘knew a lot and he taught us a lot,’ said Szlagowski. On 15 August, when the squadron was hit hard by the death of Hight and the capture of Parker, it was Hughes who led by example and took out two enemy machines. Even after the arrival on 17 August of a new and more able commanding officer, Hughes continued to play a pivotal role in the cohesion and success of the squadron.
Like his New Zealand counterpart Carbury, the Sydneysider Hughes was an Me 109 hunter. An examination of his successes reveals a strong bent towards fighter-on-fighter combat. His early claims were shared endeavours against Ju 88s, but when the squadron entered the battle proper in August, his ledger was almost exclusively marked by taking out Me 109s, with the odd foray against Me 110s. On 16, 18 and 28 August he was in action and shot down a pair of the German single-engine fighters on each occasion. Four days into September he faced a large body of Me 110s. He employed a head-on attack, his aircraft spitting two-second lead bursts at the leading Me 110. The Australian’s directness forced the Luftwaffe pilot to pull up, exposing his underbelly to raking fire. Wreathed in flame, the Me 110 crashed near Brighton. ‘I attacked another 110 and from dead astern after 2 short bursts this aircraft rolled on its back and dived vertically to the ground and blew up, 10 miles N.E. of Tangmere.’ Having upset the hornet’s nest, he found himself in the cross-hairs of a trio of the twin-engine aircraft, while another circled in from behind.
A lesser pilot might well have thought better of continuing the fight, but the rugged Hughes managed to separate one machine from the pack. ‘I followed,’ he later typed in his combat report, ‘and emptied the rest of [my] ammunition. One engine appeared to catch fire and the aircraft turned slowly towards the coast heading inland and both engines appeared to be on fire.’[33] The result was a bag of three machines for the day. Over the next two days he accounted for a further three Me 109s and one probable. One of the machines shot down on 5 September may well have been that of Oberleutnant Franz Xaver Baron von Werra. Although the ‘scalp’ of von Werra has over the years been attributed to a number of pilots, Hughes, based on his ability and run of successes in early September, is certainly a strong candidate.[34]
Hughes’ 234 Squadron was on a path to Gravesend when a tell-tale sign of invaders was spotted in the distance: bursts of anti-aircraft fire. With all eyes turned towards the action on the horizon, the Hughes-led Blue Section was jumped by Me 109s directly out of the sun. In the mêlée, twelve more intruders appeared, racing up the Thames. Outnumbered, but aided by the recent arrival of two Hurricanes, the Australian pushed the Spitfire into the centre of the enemy fighters and a heart-thumping dogfight ensued. One German aircraft exploded in response to Hughes’ Browning machineguns. He latched on to another target from astern, forcing the crippled Me 109 to land in a field. Shaken, the pilot exited the foliage-garnished and dirt-encrusted Me 109. The Queenslander observed soldiers on the scene capturing the unfortunate Luftwaffe airman.
The son of a bankrupted Swiss nobleman, von Werra had a playboy image and penchant for self-promotion. The latter included flamboyantly posing for press photographs with his pet, and unit mascot, Simba, a lion cub. Though a respected pilot, it was his exploits after being shot down that lingered in the public mind long beyond the end of the war. Von Werra did not take to captivity. His first, most widely reported, escape was carried out at Camp 13 Swanwick, Derbyshire, five days before Christmas 1940. Under the cover of an air raid, the Luftwaffe pilot and four others emerged from a newly completed tunnel and bolted for freedom. The others were netted within a few days, but von Werra avoided capture by claiming he was a downed Dutch bomber pilot. The ruse secured him transportation to the RAF airf
ield Hucknell, Nottingham. Cool and audacious, von Werra was able to allay the fears of local police as to his identity and secure entry to the base. A squadron leader remained unconvinced after questioning the ‘Dutch’ pilot and sought to confirm the story. Realising the game was unravelling, the young German made his move, attempting to convince a mechanic that he had approval to take an aircraft up for a test run. He never made the ‘test flight’, as the squadron leader returned to arrest him. Undeterred, the indefatigable von Werra was still to make his most remarkable bid for freedom, this time from Canada.
In early 1941, he was one of a group of prisoners being transferred across the Atlantic to take up residence in a camp lapped by the waters of Lake Superior, Ontario. Werra never saw the camp because he jumped from a train window outside Montreal. He found himself close to the Saint Lawrence River and made a bone-chilling crossing of the river in a pilfered rowboat without rudder or oars into the neutral United States.[35] Cold and exhausted, he handed himself into local police, who in turn advised immigration officials who sought to charge him with illegal entry into the country. Days slipped into weeks as the Canadians negotiated for his extradition. Von Werra moved about freely, with much of his time spent enjoying the high life in New York at the expense of the German Consulate. When it appeared that the Canadians might in fact successfully secure his return, German Consulate officials moved quickly and slipped him into Mexico.
His eventual return to Germany was by no means unpleasant and included stopovers in Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona and Rome. In the second week of April he was welcomed back to the Fatherland with open arms and a Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.