Pilot Officer Lacey was wearing crepe-soled shoes and the carpet had a pile an inch and a half thick. ‘I turned rather smartly to the left, but my feet stayed where they were. Eventually’—eventually!—‘I had to shuffle them round. Then I was quite baffled when the King asked me when I was awarded the D.F.M. I couldn’t remember. And to make it even worse, he said “And when were you awarded the bar to it?” and I couldn’t remember that either. I think by the time I left he was convinced that I was an imposter, collecting it for someone else.’
There was something of a party that evening. There always was, after an investiture, which brought old friends together from all over the country. Lacey, when he woke next morning, couldn’t remember leaving the ‘Chez Moi’, a Soho club much favoured by air crews. Looking around, from the sofa on which he had slept, he found that he was still there.
And so back to Filton and Chalmy Down, and the long spells of inactivity caused by bad weather; the only variety, on one of the days when he could fly, provided by a barrage balloon which had broken free from the Bristol defences, that he had to shoot down.
Convoy patrols … training replacement pilots … formation flying. The weeks passed and life was unbelievably tranquil after the hectic weeks in France and at Gravesend and Kenley. On 9th April the squadron was posted to Colerne, on the outskirts of Bath.
And on the 17th they flew their first sweep over enemy territory, escorting eighteen Blenheims which bombed the docks at Cherbourg. Life seemed to have a purpose and reality again. At last they were taking the offensive, for the first time since being thrown out of France ten months before. It was odd, with memory so clear of that damnable Tannoy screeching its infernal ‘Scramble’, actually to be enjoying this. Where were those Me 109s? Why didn’t they come and take a crack? We’d like to see them again. Look out! That flak was pretty close … and the Blenheim boys are getting a hot reception … takes nerve to hold steady on a bombing run, straight and level, presenting a good target to the ground gunners … can’t sit around here, watching … here comes some more flak—quick! bank hard to port and climb a bit, to fox the Hun … How easy it was to slip back into the old habits of self-preservation that were instinctive now, and would never be forgotten.
Only one day stands out in memory. Squadron Leader Holden and Pilot Officer Lacey were selected for the privilege of going to nearby Colerne to be presented to Her Majesty Queen Mary, the Queen Mother. Her Majesty’s superb bearing and ineffable charm left an abiding impression on a man not readily impressed.
And then another week of convoy patrols, wing formation, squadron formation … anything to pass the time until there was a real job to tackle once more ….
Until one morning the Squadron Adjutant came into the crew room. ‘Anybody here flown Spitfires?’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve got to collect some for the squadron, from Exeter.’
Pilot Officer Lacey, who was bored, looked up from the ‘Tee Emm’ he was reading. ‘Yes, I’ve flown Spits.’ He hadn’t, but he supposed they were no more difficult to fly than Hurricanes.
Twenty minutes later, he found himself in a Blenheim bound for Exeter; flown by a wing commander, no less: Charles Beamish, Colerne’s Wing Commander Flying.
‘There you are, Lacey,’ said the wing commander, as they circled the aerodrome, ‘all lined up, waiting for you. Look good, don’t they?’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the bold pilot officer, trying to sound keen. Where the hell was everybody? There had better be at least one pilot around the place to tell him how to handle the damn things …
‘Find them much different from a Hurricane, to fly?’ Oh! These chatty wingcos.
‘N-n-non-not really, sir … It looked as though 88 Squadron had flown away in their brand new Spitfire IIs, and left their old Spit Is for 501 to pick up without a pilot to do the honours and hand them over formally.
They had.
Wing Commander Beamish decided he’d like to stretch his legs.
‘I’ll walk over with you and see you take off.’
‘D-don’t trouble, sir …’
‘No trouble, old boy …’
Old Boy! He’ll change his tune when I wrap the squadron’s first Spitfire round the Flying Control Tower. Inspiration! ‘I think the Flying Control chap wants you, sir … yes … he’s beckoning from the window …’
‘Oh, is he? Suppose I’d better go and have a word with him … tell him I’ll be taking off again in a few minutes …’
Lacey chased after a passing airman in overalls, who looked as though he must be a flight mechanic. ‘Airman! Know anything about Spitfires?’
‘What d’you want to know, sir?’
‘Quick—into the cockpit and shew me how to start the engine and … and where all the knobs and taps are.’
The airman pushed his forage cap back and scratched his head, eyeing Lacey’s pilot’s wings and D.F.M. ribbon with its rosette.
By the time the Wing Commander Flying arrived alongside, Lacey was just waving away the chocks, with confidence.
Once he was airborne, trial and error provided the identity of the various levers which the airman had lacked time to explain. He delighted in the lightness and responsiveness of this aeroplane, compared with the old Hurricane.
In the next three or four days he ferried most of the Spitfires to Colerne and was able to make sure that he was allotted the best of them as his own aircraft. So, when Wing Commander Flying came and invited him to do some cine practice (simulated combat with camera guns to record results), he thought it would be interesting to palm him off with the worst of them; a sluggish machine with a lamentable rate of climb, a radius of turn that would have been fatal in action and a derisory top speed.
Beamish acted first as target. Lacey promptly positioned himself on his tail and stayed there, despite frenzied evasive action, until he had used all his film. Now it was Lacey’s turn to be the target. ‘Right,’ said the wing commander. ‘Begin evasive action.’ Whereupon Lacey whirled round and sat on his opponent’s tail once more. It took Wing Commander Beamish a long time to expose his film.
They landed, Lacey wondering what would happen now. ‘I can’t believe I’m as bad as all that,’ Beamish told him. ‘We’ll change machines and go up again.’ This time, Lacey could neither get onto his opponent’s tail nor shake him off his own.
Coming in to land, Lacey noticed that the ‘T’ outside the Control Tower, which showed the wind direction, had been turned 180 degrees. On both their take-offs and on their first landing, the wind had been blowing from due west and they had, of course, taken off and landed into it. He duly made his approach in the reverse, and now correct, direction. Touching down, letting his tail drop, he could not see ahead because the up-thrust nose of a Spitfire obscured its pilot’s view. Half-way along the runway he was hurled forward in his straps with a violence that threatened to rip them apart; his head jerked forward with a snap that nearly tore it from his shoulders. There was a deafening clang of rending metal, his windscreen and canopy shivered into a myriad cracks, his engine screamed and died. With his intestines feeling like cold jelly, he fumbled with his straps, found his hands trembling, and heard the siren and bell of a fire-engine and an ambulance approaching. Wing Commander Flying had collided with him, head-on.
‘Needless to say, I was fireproof.’
In May the squadron became operational on Spitfires. On 17th June it flew another sweep; but, as back area escort, didn’t cross the French coast.
On 24th June, Lacey was promoted to Flight Lieutenant and now commanded ‘A’ Flight, which he had joined as a sergeant one year and nine months previously.
The new Squadron Commander was Squadron Leader A. H. Boyd, D.F.C. and bar, who had accumulated a score of twelve hostiles with. Nos. 65 and 145 Squadrons. ‘B’ Flight was commanded by Flight Lieutenant R. C. Dafforn, D.F.C., who had been a sergeant with Lacey in France.
On the next day 501 was posted to Chilbolton, in Hampshire, a grass airf
ield which had no domestic accommodation. This station was a satellite of Middle Wallop, which was now commanded by Group Captain (later Air Chief Marshal) Sir W. Elliot, D.F.C. ‘A’ Flight Commander found himself a billet in a house called ‘Testcombe’, on the river Test, owned by a Mrs Disraeli. He admits that he was very comfortable there.
Now began a period of night flying patrols over Portsmouth. With three or four aircraft airborne at the same time, steeped at two thousand-foot intervals, pilots were ordered to stick rigidly to their allotted level. One night, Lacey was flying at the top of the stack when he saw, silhouetted on the background of a fire in the docks and the searchlight beams, a Ju. 88. Instantly, determined not to let slip the opportunity for which everyone on the squadron had waited for seven months, to bring down their first hostile aircraft by night, he slipped into the familiar mood of intense concentration; his left foot impatiently rat-tatting on the cockpit floor, his thumb on the firing button; his throat constricting and his teeth chewing involuntarily on his lower lip.
The hunt was on. The bomber circled lazily, no doubt admiring the effects of its night’s work. Cagily, Lacey brought his Spitfire round until he was a hundred feet above and to one beam. Then he depressed his nose, pressed home the trigger and exulted as he saw the bright splashes of his de Wild ammunition along the enemy’s fuselage.
The Ju. 88 dived, and Lacey, forgetting his orders to stay within his fixed height band, followed it.
His eyes were dazzled by the strong light from below, exaggerated by the surrounding blackness. For an instant he lost his quarry; found it and touched off a short squirt; saw it flit away and disappear momentarily; saw it reappear and fire again.
Two or three thousand feet slipped by while he kept losing and finding it again; and now the Ju. 88’s turns became tighter and faster; until it was holding its own with the Spitfire, baffling Lacey.
The R/T came to life, and he heard the voice of the C.O., who was supposed to be flying at the level immediately beneath him, report that he was in contact with the enemy. Then …
‘A thought crossed my mind …’
Lacey called the C.O. ‘Please flash your navigation lights.’ And, as he had suspected, the aircraft which he was trying so hard to shoot down blinked out a series of bright flashes.
Not all the perils of flying, especially at night, were attributable to the Germans.
He had to lean heavily on Adrian Boyd’s sense of humour when he met him in the crew room an hour later.
On l0th July, 501 gave high cover to twelve Blenheims bombing Cherbourg. Lacey, flying left weaver, called a warning that two Me. 109s were diving to the attack. He broke, delivered a three-second quarter attack on one of them, and it dived into the sea in flames. Boyd damaged the other. There was no further interference with the mission.
There was another trip to Cherbourg that week, and this time he damaged a 109.
Exactly a week from then he was part of an escort for some Blenheims which were making an air/sea rescue search ten miles south of Portland, when there was a flicker of colour in the corner of his left eye and he turned his head sharply to see tracer fire licking past his port wing tip. He half-rolled and pulled through to find a He. 59 marked with the red cross in his sights at a range of 250 yards, from which he let it have a two-second squirt. Closing to fifty yards, on its tail, he gave it another two seconds’ worth of treatment and, as it was merely flying at 100 ft., it ploughed into the water and sank.
The red cross was no protection to aircraft which carried machine guns and, indeed, initiated attacks. As long as twelve months before this time, two He. 59s with red crosses had been forced down: their log-books showed that they were carrying out reconnaissance and reporting back by radio. The British Government thereupon issued a formal warning to the Germans that such aircraft would, in future, be attacked. Several of them had been shot down before Lacey got his and he was right not to hesitate in taking the action that he did.
It was while he was at Chilbolton that the factory in Australia which manufactured the first parachute to be made in that country, sent it to him as a gift; and with it, a silk scarf embroidered with the names of a hundred girl employees, some of whom had taken part in the production of both articles. These were a tribute to his success in shooting down the Heinkel which had bombed Buckingham Palace. The presentation was made by Air Vice Marshal Sir C. J. Quintin Brand, K.B.E., D.S.O., M.C., Air Officer Commanding No. 10 Group; who, himself, had destroyed a Gotha in the last raid on England in 1918.
Next came preparation for a task which was to provide Lacey with the worst scare of his career.
Equipped with Spitfire 11s carrying thirty-gallon long range tanks under their port wings, the squadron carried out daily practices at 20,000 ft. Their object: to give high cover to bombers on an attack on the German pocket battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in Brest Harbour.
On 24th July, 1941, they flew to Predannack, in Cornwall, the most westerly of fighter aerodromes, to refuel. At 2.42 p.m. they were on their way.
This was not a popular job. Flying a single-engined aeroplane over 150 miles of water never is. Brest was ferociously defended by one of the strongest flak belts in Europe. There was a big German Air Force fighter airfield nearby. And the tanks under the Spitfires’ wing-tips made them manoeuvrable, particularly in turns to port, which became dolorously slow.
Five miles west of Brest, Flight Lieutenant Lacey, in the position of top weaver, saw two condensation trails overhead, shadowing the British formation, and climbed to investigate. Meanwhile, heavy flak had started to burst around him. Before he went up, he saw two bombers hit: one dissolved in a giant puff-ball of fragments and the other dropped vertically with flames and thousands of feet of smoke laying a pall behind it.
Urging the best speed from his machine, keeping his eyes on the two con. trails, he climbed to 30,000 ft before, from a thousand feet above, two Me. 109s dived in a synchronized attack. Splitting as they came, one rushed at him from the right while the other swept round to settle on his tail. Desperately he turned into the man on his beam, reviling the tank that hung from his wing and dragged him back. A stream of tracer coruscated past. The 109 to his right flicked momently into his sights, he gave it a sharp burst, and the man behind loomed horribly in his mirror.
From the latter’s gun ports burst vermilion jets of flame and bullets thudded into the armour behind Lacey’s head.
With his senses on the verge of a black-out he held grimly to his dizzy turn, keeping one of his opponents intermittently in his sights and shooting whenever he could. For long minutes they churned round in a deadlock, neither able to get on the other’s tail and Lacey unable to break because he would instantly have abandoned the only safeguard he had. This way, at least he could contain one of them: but it couldn’t go on for ever; he hadn’t the fuel to spare for one thing, if he wanted to reach Predannack again.
Like aerial dervishes, Spitfire and Messerschmitts clung to each other, and Lacey, snap shooting, at last heard the hiss of compressed air and felt the cessation of his gun’s recoil that told him he had used the last of his ammunition.
If he was to live, now, it must be a matter of airmanship, not marksmanship.
And the second Messerschmitt, having pulled away to one side, was making a deflection attack from abeam.
He tried to compress his body into the smallest possible space as tracer thrashed at him from the starboard side … and then from port … and from starboard again … then from port once more …
His legs and arms were stiff and cramped, his head was fogging as blood drained From his brain.
Once more the loose 109 pulled away, and this time it came in with terrifying accuracy.
In a last effort, Lacey pulled the stick back and sent his Spitfire leaping up in a near-vertical climb.
Two seconds later a tremendous blast of disturbed air pummelled him between the shoulders, a noise like the crack of doom battered at his ears; and in his mirror he saw the two Me. 1
09s collide, hang in the air locked together, then swiftly begin to fall in a rapidly increasing spin; inseparably welded by the force of their collision at a closing speed of 800 m.p.h., they sent off a shower of sparks that presently turned to flames; he saw one of the pilots bale out, but the other, who was flown into, must have been mashed to pulp.
He searched the sky and found himself alone. It was time to set course for base.
Half-way across the Channel he overtook a Wellington that was returning from Brest. It looked like a flying bird cage, its geodetic framework exposed by the fabric which had been shot away.
He came alongside to fly in formation with the bomber until they sighted home. The Wimpey pilot made delighted thumbs-up gestures, grateful for the fighter escort.
‘Little did he know that I was hanging around there because I thought he might have some ammunition left for his guns and could escort me home.’
It was a fitting end to two years with 501 Squadron.
On the 18th August, 1941, he was posted as an instructor to No. 57 Operational Training Unit, at Hawarden, in Flintshire.
CHAPTER NINE - On Rest—Back on Ops
For a moment, Lacey wondered whether he had forsaken the Royal Air Force in favour of la vie diplomatique. Saying good-bye, one morning, to the last surviving descendant of Benjamin Disraeli, he found himself, the same afternoon, settling down in Hawarden Castle, the temporary Officers’ Mess, which was owned by Lord Gladstone. He had come a long way since a scattering of W.A.A.F. at Kenley had tasted like High Life.
1,620 hours of flying, more than half of it in the Service, and over 300 of those hours on operations, had left their mark on him. When he went to Fifty-Seven O.T.U. he no longer looked the boy whose appearance belied his lethal accomplishments. The exuberance of fair hair was hidden with some austerity under an officers’ Service Dress cap, his features had sharpened and there were lines about his eyes and cheeks. The diffidence apparent in his demeanour a year or two earlier had given place to a self-assurance which was evident even in formal group photographs.
Ginger Lacey: Fighter Pilot Page 13