Dogfight

by Adam Claasen

  Unfortunately, Hughes would only have a couple of days to celebrate his victory over von Werra. He was killed on 7 September. The Australian was once again leading Blue Section when they encountered a large force. The ensuing dogfight claimed the lives of the squadron leader, O’Brien, as well as Hughes. The death of the latter appears to have been the result of a mid-air collision. The squadron’s intelligence report was based on the observations of Hughes’ wing-man and fellow Anzac, the Kiwi Keith Lawrence, and gives an incomplete picture of the tragic events that led to the death of the squadron’s most revered pilot.

  Blue Section ... engaged a formation of Do 17s. Blue 1 [Hughes] made a quarter attack on a straggling Do 17 below the rest of the formation and Blue 2 [Lawrence] saw large pieces fly off the enemy aircraft, then a wing crumpled and finally the enemy aircraft went into a spin. Immediately afterwards Blue 1 went spinning down with about one-third of the wing broken and crashed. F/Lt. Hughes was killed.[36]

  There is good reason to believe that the fatigue tormenting many Fighter Command pilots played a factor in Hughes’ death. The squadron’s intelligence officer considered the Aussie to be the ‘hero’ of the unit and he was devastated by the loss and felt some guilt over the whole affair. ‘When he came and saw me the night before he died, saying he had spots in front of his eyes, it was already too late. How could pilots cope with the tension? In a way I felt responsible for Pat’s death.’[37]

  Girlfriends and Wives

  Not only was the loss of Hughes keenly felt in the 234 mess but also by his wife of only thirty-eight days. The Australian pilot had sent his wife Kay away during the intense fighting of early September to stay with her mother. She returned on 7 September to find a clutch of the squadron’s pilots awaiting her arrival at Middle Wallop. ‘I knew that Pat was missing,’ she recalled. ‘That evening I learned he had been killed. Until then I had never really known what true grief was. I had never cried so much in my life. I wept until I could cry no more.’[38]

  Like many Anzacs, Hughes had met his wife in Britain. Kay Brodrick had crossed the Australian’s path when he was posted to Leconfield. She was immediately smitten by his good looks, his smart airman’s moustache and the dark blue RAAF uniform. She dubbed him ‘an Australian Errol Flynn’.[39]

  Fighter Command pilots had found themselves increasingly popular and welcome in the pubs and taverns of Britain after Churchill’s speech of 20 August. As one 92 Squadron pilot later recalled with pleasure, ‘It was unbelievable. They loved us, and I mean they loved us. They brought us drinks, appreciated everything.’[40]

  This celebrity status also brought with it the almost unqualified admiration of the fair sex. Having arrived at a local drinking establishment, usually in modern low-slung sports cars, the young pilots would enter wearing their trousers tucked into their flying boots, top jacket buttons undone and caps slightly askew at a suitably rakish angle. Removing the cap often revealed slicked-back hair. ‘There was no doubt about it,’ Gard’ner recalled, ‘the Battle of Britain boys were known as the Brylcreem boys ... I used Brylcreem myself.’[41] The RAF wings and blue uniform were a magnet to the eyes of many young, and not so young, women. Many of the friendships struck up were of an innocuous nature. The young men sought out female companionship which did not necessarily lead to sexual relationships. But as the battle intensified in August and September, and the chances of survival fell, more passionate liaisons were a consequence. Looking back over the excesses in the air and in the night clubs, Spurdle described relationships fashioned briefly at the height of the campaign:

  Men with wives or sweethearts at home were under an added strain. With life so demonstrably short, who could censure those who lived it to the full? No wonder many of us put our home life into limbo—something to be treasured and thought about in solitude with love.

  The bar girls and night club hostesses only lightly brushed our lives; casual couplings forgotten in the light of day.[42]

  A good number of the pilots sought love and companionship fashioned after the ideal of the time: marriage. However, courtship and long-term relationships were difficult to maintain when pilots were constantly in action and squadrons could be moved at a moment’s notice. As airmen and their brides-to-be were separated by the demands of Fighter Command, the best that could be hoped for were all-too-brief reunions as leave allowed, lovelorn letters and telephone conversations. The last were restricted to three minutes, and unreliable.

  As Kay Hughes discovered, for those who made it to the church or registry, there was no assurance that their marriage would outlive the battle. In some cases the time between slipping on a wedding ring and entering widowhood could be horribly short. In the latter stages of the campaign, Emeny was among airmen attending the marriage of a young Scottish Spitfire pilot. Within two hours of the early-morning wedding service, the husband had been killed in action. The funeral was held that evening. ‘The Kiwi boys put what money we had into a pool,’ and Emeny was delegated to escort the grieving young woman by taxi to an aunt’s London residence. She sobbed inconsolably the entire journey. As Sergeant Emeny made his way back to the airbase, he vowed never to ‘mix marriage and war,’ reasoning, ‘I never wanted to be responsible for the grief I had just seen’.[43]

  A marriage that survived the carnage was not without its own trials. Gordon Olive met Helen Thomas in his pre-war Austrian excursions. Almost immediately the Anzac took a shine to the young Englishwoman, who had been working in Germany for twelve months. In the 1940 run-up to their engagement, there had been the odd heart-stopping moment for Helen, including the occasion Olive was temporarily reported missing after a particularly nasty dogfight. Like so many weddings of the time, the June service was abbreviated and spare—a couple of Olive’s closest squadron friends were in attendance at the small church of St Mary’s, Kensington. The honeymoon was a grand four days spent in a cosy hotel on the Thames east of London—well away from Hornchurch and Manston.[44] Because Helen worked at St Thomas’ Hospital London, Olive, after returning to his unit, did not see her again until he was granted forty-two hours’ leave on 8 August. Another month would pass before he saw her again. Thus, by mid-September, he had only seen her twice in three months of marriage.[45]

  The death of Hughes was just the latest in a series of grim losses besetting a teetering Fighter Command. Dowding was only too aware that the very life of his force was slowly being wrung from it. The attacks on the sector airfields had produced casualty rates greater than hitherto experienced over Britain. Over a two-week period Dowding was faced with the grim reality of 103 pilot casualties, a figure that equated to a weekly wastage rate of ten per cent of his fighting strength.[46] In the seven-week period ending 6 September, Dowding’s force shed 161 machines against 189 German aircraft of all types lost. Not only were the training units unable to keep up with the demand for pilots, but it now appeared that even aircraft supply efforts might have met their match. The bombing of the advanced airfields made them barely operable and raids on Park’s sector stations brought them to the verge of foundering:

  ...the enemy’s bombing attacks by day did extensive damage to five of our forward aerodromes and also to six of our seven sector stations. There was a critical period when damage to sector stations and/or ground organisation was having a serious effect on the technical and administrative service ... The absence of many essential telephone lines, the use of scratch equipment in emergency operations rooms, and the general dislocation of ground organisation, was seriously felt for about a week in the handling of squadrons ... to meet the enemy’s massed attacks, which were continued without the former occasional break of a day.[47]

  Park was of the opinion that, ‘had the enemy continued his heavy attacks against Biggin Hill and the adjacent sectors ... the fighter defences of London would have been in a perilous state.’[48] Then, on the day that Hughes was killed and his wife left grieving, London was set on fire. The campaign had changed direction again.

  CHAPTER 9

&n
bsp; London Burning

  At daybreak on 7 September, Fighter Command prepared for a continuation of the assaults of the past week. The morning was hot, the sky clear and sunny: just the sort of weather dreaded by the wary men of Fighter Command. Pilots and machines waited across 11 Group for the inevitable scramble, but the hours passed in relative calm, the eye of the storm. As midday rolled into the afternoon it appeared that the Luftwaffe might be taking the day off; then, at 4.00p.m., martial storm clouds began gathering in the east. Radar reports indicated that a build-up was under way and squadrons were placed on alert. Seventeen minutes later, eleven squadrons were scrambled. Ten and 12 Groups were placed on readiness.

  Watching the massive German force depart was Göring, the corpulent commander of the Luftwaffe, who had arrived recently to take personal command of the operation. From the lofty cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez he stood with Kesselring, admiring the mustering and launching of his forces. The vast fleet of German aircraft numbered close to 1000, an armada never before seen in aerial combat. The twin-engine bombers rose from 14,000 to 20,000 feet and made up a third of the fleet. The remainder, deadly fighters, prowled at higher altitudes. Fighter Command assumed that the force would break apart and head for the sector stations, with ancillary assaults on aircraft industries. Instead it headed straight for the world’s largest city: London.

  The move from attacking the airfields to an assault on London was a course first embarked upon back on 24 August when the capital was bombed in error, an act that set in motion a series of tit-for-tat reprisals. When Berliners died under the British bombs four days later, Hitler’s mood turned sour and he directed Göring to plan for an all-out assault on London. Up until this point there had been a general unwritten rule that civilian targets were off-limits. In practice, though, the rudimentary accuracy of the bombers and the proximity of housing to factories, ports and railways usually resulted in some civilian losses. Bomber Command’s continued attacks, small-scale though they were, increasingly infuriated the Führer. On 4 September, to a highly charged audience at the Berlin Sportpalast he declared: ‘Mr Churchill is demonstrating to us ... his innovation: the nightly air raid ... And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities. We will put these night-time pirates out of business, God help us!’ With regard to the invasion, Hitler told his audience that, in Britain, ‘They enquire: “Well, why isn’t he coming?” Calm yourselves,’ Hitler proclaimed theatrically. ‘He is coming!’[1]

  Still harbouring the mistaken belief that Fighter Command was on its last legs, Luftwaffe commanders, Kesselring especially, wanted to bring the remaining rag-tag elements of Dowding’s force to the field of battle to deliver the decisive blow. What better place than London? Not only did the city on the Thames house a fifth of the nation’s citizenry, but its great port was the hub of a transport network with spokes reaching out to the furthermost points of the island. The economic, cultural and political heart of the British Empire would be easy to find and hard to miss for Luftwaffe crews. It was reasoned that massed bomber raids would force Fighter Command to defend the capital, and there meet their demise.

  Göring concurred, but had his own reasons for the assault: a wounded ego. He had always promised that Berlin would never suffer the indignity of enemy bombs, but in the wake of RAF raids, his stock with Hitler and the German people had fallen to a dangerously low point. Moreover, despite Hitler’s public proclamation that an invasion was on the cards, whispers could be heard at the highest level that his enthusiasm for the venture was waning. Göring felt success over London would restore his tarnished prestige and perhaps still bring Churchill to the negotiating table.

  Target London

  Expecting the hammer to fall on the sector stations, the squadrons were unable to intercept the bombers until late in their run on the city and well after many had dropped their payloads. The vanguard pilots were gobsmacked by the Leviathan bearing down on London. ‘I nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit,’ the leader of 605 Squadron exclaimed, ‘Staffel after Staffel as far as the eye could see ... I have never seen so many aircraft in the air at one time. It was awe-inspiring.’[2] In the face of impossible odds a mere handful of squadrons ploughed into the tsunami of enemy machines.

  Two of the first squadrons on the scene were 501 and 504, flying out of Middle Wallop and Hendon respectively. Gibson was leading 501 when it encountered over 100 Me 109s. The screen was almost impossible to penetrate, although the unit was able to make a definite claim and the New Zealander was credited with damaging a fighter. A King’s College old boy, Kenneth Victor Wendel had only arrived in south-east England in early September when 504 Squadron was transferred in from Scotland. His baptism of fire was short and terminal. On patrol south of the Thames Estuary, he was part of the formation’s defensive rearguard, when six enemy aircraft dived out of the sun from above and behind. An Me 109 crippled his Hurricane and the machine fell from the sky in an uncontrollable dive, last seen by locals smashing into the ground near Graveney, Kent.[3]

  Air-raid alarms were sounding in London, but the response was muted. The sky remained clear and warnings over the preceding weeks had been mirages. When the usual all-clear signal failed to materialise, Londoners looked to the heavens. ‘I had a view across to the east and I saw the planes...,’ wrote one young Londoner, ‘They were following the Thames like a little swarm of flies. They puffed up some anti-aircraft fire all around them and as I sat there watching, the planes got more and more numerous. The clouds of smoke began to rise from the East End. Then the clouds gradually became one huge cloud.’[4] Bombs from the first wave fell mercilessly on the warehouses, terraced housing and the all-important target, the docks of the East End.

  It was not until about 5.00p.m. that Fighter Command realised that London was the day’s objective. The resulting aerial battle was on a titanic scale. One thousand enemy machines were engaged piecemeal by up to twenty-three squadrons. A grand but frightening spectacle was playing itself out above the upturned heads of Londoners. New Zealander John Morrison, himself an airman, was on leave in London during the attacks of September and was awestruck by the unfolding events:

  We saw 25 Heinkel bombers approaching from the S.E., in V formation. A.A. guns started firing and putting up a pretty hot barrage for a couple of minutes, without success, until six—only six—Hurricanes dived out of the sky—then the guns ceased fire. They sailed into the formation like a lot of little wasps and, within minutes, the formation was completely broken up, six Heinkels were crashing to the earth, leaving long spirals of thick smoke, and the remaining bombers turned right about and went for their lives with the fighters chasing them, running circles around them. I should think that they shot down a few more, but they soon passed out of sight.... It was an inspiring sight, just like watching a football match really—crowds of people cheering and shouting.[5]

  The blue arena was a canvas stamped with the military lines of bombers in formation, but cross-hatched with the white cotton contrails of single-engine fighters peppering the sky with cannon and machine-gun fire. The black oily smudge of machines belching their last breath slashed across the summer vista, punctuated with the white anti-aircraft fire and the odd gently descending silk parachute. The odds against the fighters were formidable.

  The commander of 43 Squadron dispatched two sections to attack the bombers while his own Yellow Section confronted the German fighters, in effect three Hurricanes against hundreds of single and twin-engine Messerschmitts. The results were predictable. The squadron leader was killed and the Anzac Dick Reynell was hit.[6] The South Australian Flight Lieutenant was one of Fighter Command’s most accomplished airmen, entering the RAF in 1931 and then taking up a position as a test pilot with Hawker Aircraft Ltd in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland he pleaded to re-enter the RAF but was considered too valuable to let go. Only in the August manpower crisis were test pilots rushed in to shore up the shrinking numbers of airmen and he was shipped
out to 43 Squadron. But his considerable talents were not enough in the face of impossible odds. An Me 109 immobilised his Hurricane, forcing Reynell to bale out. The parachute failed to open and he plummeted to his death.

  Wellington-born Charles Bush hunted with the 242 ‘Canadian’ Squadron, led by Douglas Bader. The fiery Bader had brought the unit back from despair after massive losses in France in May. When Leigh-Mallory received the call for support he once again attempted to assemble a Big Wing, which of course included Bader’s 242, over Duxford, in order to hit the enemy with a powerful punch. As before, the idea proved more difficult to accomplish than hoped and the interception of incoming bombers failed, but at 20,000 feet elements of the Big Wing did manage to attack a formation of eighty-odd aircraft over the Thames. ‘On sighting enemy aircraft, I did a quarter attack on the rear-most bomber of the formation,’ recorded Bush. This and a subsequent foray against the bomber were interrupted by Me 110 fire. In the dogfight he damaged both an He 111 and a twin-engine fighter. The former insurance company employee’s realistic tally was far removed from that of the rest of the force, which in total claimed an outrageously high eleven aircraft destroyed.[7]

  On the ground, the Luftwaffe’s bombs found their target: the Woolwich Arsenal. Home to manufacturing plants producing munitions for the army and RAF, direct hits immediately created a conflagration of ground-shaking explosions, soon followed by incandescent flames and spiralling dirty black smoke. Göring’s next target was the London docks. The vital entry and exit point for the Empire’s commerce was carpeted with bombs. ‘We passed under Tower Bridge and soon were on the edge of an inferno,’ recalled a voluntary fireman on an Emergency Fireboat, ‘Everything was alight, tugs and barges were flaming and sinking into the water. All the timber of Surrey Commercial Docks was blazing furiously.’[8] The German machines laid waste to built-up working-class housing in the East End. A sixteen-year-old with the local Civil Defence confessed he was terrified, holding a fire hose ‘amid the burning buildings—I couldn’t touch the buttons on my tunic because they were so hot. My face blistered. I don’t think you ever get immune to it—the wreckage, the dead bodies. It was a kaleidoscope of hell.’[9]