As he was doing this, an Me 109 flew directly in front of him, heading towards the Master, causing Leathart and White to run for shelter. Higher up, Allen was now surrounded by 109s, and radioed Deere for help. Deere shot down the 109 directly in front of him before climbing to meet Allen, firing at one Messerschmitt and chasing another away. Once the Master was in the air, all three aircraft headed for home.
Thinking back to the action, Deere has no memory of being afraid. ‘It was the thrill of the thing really. There was no sense of danger at that stage.’ So excited was he that he carried on chasing the final 109 even when he had used up all his ammunition. ‘That shows you how really green I was,’ he says. But the combat gave him confidence, convincing him that there was no reason to fear the 109. He also learned to watch his fuel – a crucial theme in Chris Nolan’s film.
There were skirmishes throughout the day on 26 May, but many British patrols were cancelled due to poor weather. And there were losses due to friendly fire.* John Nicholas remembers: ‘My great friend, Flying Officer Johnny Welford was shot down by a British destroyer and killed, on 26 May off the Goodwin Sands. He bailed out – his parachute streamed but it didn’t open and he was killed. By the time they realised what they had done and dragged him out, it was too late.’
On the same day over Dunkirk, Peter Parrott of 145 Squadron spotted a Heinkel 111 and broke formation to go after it. He started firing and ‘it very rudely shot back’. Parrott realised that the Heinkel’s gunner must have hit his radiator because his cockpit filled with steam. He turned for home and was halfway across the Channel when his squadron caught up with him: ‘There was a lot of chatter on the radio about what was wrong with me. As I got over the coast at Deal, my engine stopped.’ The plane dropped to three or four thousand feet and Parrott tried to find somewhere to land. He saw uneven areas, and people out for their Sunday evening walk, before picking a field and shoving the stick forward. He hit a few sheep, turning them to mutton. People started to gather around the Hurricane, and a policeman showed up. Parrott asked him to keep the crowd away from the loaded guns, and asked where he could find a telephone. A farmer came by on a horse and trap. ‘Who’s gonna pay for them sheep?’ he said to Parrott. ‘Try the Air Ministry,’ said Parrott. The farmer rode off but Parrott still needed a telephone and realised the nearest was the farmer’s. When he reached the farmhouse, the farmer and his wife were having tea and there was a large, juicy ham on the table. Parrott put in a call to Manston airfield and asked to be collected. Then the farmer pointed down the hallway and said, ‘You can sit there!’ Parrott sat on his own. He wasn’t offered any ham.
Living lives of such unpredictability, pilots did what they could to boost morale. A flight commander of 610 Squadron remembers an officer who, having worked at Harrods before the war, called in his contacts. A Harrods van arrived every morning with food and drink for the day; the pilots had fillet steak for lunch, lobster thermidor for dinner, and immense danger between meals. And despite their lack of preparation and experience, pilots seemed eager to see action. When names were drawn from a hat for the honour of making 19 Squadron’s first patrol over Dunkirk, Brian Lane recorded George Unwin’s reaction on being the man left behind: ‘He stood looking at me with a hurt expression on his face, for all the world like a dog who has been told he can’t come for a walk.’ From that day until his death in 2006, Unwin was known as ‘Grumpy’.
The following day, 27 May, the evacuation was fully under way. But only 7,669 British troops left Dunkirk. And in the meantime, despite the pessimism of Goering’s commanders, the campaign began promisingly for the Luftwaffe with the almost complete destruction of the inner harbour.* And though the pilots of Fighter Command were enthusiastic, few had yet seen an enemy plane.
George ‘Grumpy’ Unwin had a surprisingly common experience when he first encountered the enemy: he froze. ‘I just sat there in a turn,’ he says, ‘not petrified, but frozen for about ten to fifteen seconds.’ When enemy gunfire struck his fuselage, the moment was broken – and it never happened to him again. ‘I always regarded the first time you got mixed up as being the most dangerous. One isn’t used to being shot at in any walk of life.’ A sergeant pilot of 222 Squadron found himself admiring Me 109s on his first engagement. ‘They looked so pretty!’ he says. But by the time his moment was broken, the pretty machines had got on his tail and his engine was pouring smoke.
Pilots were learning to ignore official rules and guidelines. They stopped flying in the old First World War Vic formation, for example – with a leader and two wingmen – and instead began copying the German formations learned while flying in the Spanish Civil War and the Polish campaign. In terms of experience – and therefore tactics – the Germans were well ahead of the British.
And it paid to ignore another guideline – concerning height. Pilots were initially told to stay at 20,000 feet, and never to fly lower than 15,000 feet, as the anti-aircraft gunners were supposedly able to take care of enemy planes at lower levels. But this had disadvantages. For one thing, it meant that Stukas were all out of range, as they started their dives at 15,000 feet; for another, it meant that Royal Air Force aircraft were too high to be seen by British soldiers on the ground. These factors led to British aircraft flying lower – even if it meant being shot at regularly by British naval guns.
On 27 May, the Germans’ large formations threatened to outnumber the RAF. ‘The norm was for up to twelve Hurricanes to be attacking 40 to 50 German aeroplanes,’ says Roland Beamont, ‘but sometimes the odds were greater than that.’ The numerous bombers were able to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on the town and the beaches – though many hit the sand where their energy was dissipated and much of their destructive power wasted.
Yet the RAF had considerable success on this day. Thirty German aircraft were lost, and the Boulton Paul Defiants excelled. Early in the morning, they brought down two Me 109s, and on their next patrol, at least another three, possibly five – without loss. German pilots did not yet appreciate the particular danger these aircraft presented with their turret gunners.
The next day, Tuesday 28 May, the bombers of Fliegerkorps I, II and VII were set to work over Dunkirk, protected by the fighters of Jagdfliegerführer 3. On the same day, a message came from the chief of the British air staff warning that the RAF must make ‘their greatest effort’. Fighter Command was instructed to protect the Dunkirk beaches ‘from first light until darkness by continuous fighter patrols’ and, critically, all patrols would be ‘at a strength of at least two squadrons’. The Luftwaffe was about to face its first serious air battle.
Faced with gruppe-sized opponents, the British had little choice but to send up larger units – but this meant that fewer patrols could be made, and longer gaps were left between each. These gaps could be exploited by the Germans. Fighter Command was also facing its first serious challenge.
54 Squadron made a dawn patrol on the morning of 28 May. Spotting a Dornier, Al Deere led the chase. ‘I was firing a burst at him,’ he says, ‘and suddenly I could see return fire from the rear gunner.’ He felt his Spitfire judder and guessed that a bullet had pierced his glycol tank. With his cooling system hit, he couldn’t continue, and had to come down. He crash-landed on the beach. He did, in other words, what the character Farrier does in the film. As Deere made impact with the ground, he was injured, gashing his eyebrow. He had landed wheels up on the water’s edge and the tide was coming in. He wandered up the beach towards a café and looked back to see the tide already rolling in around his Spitfire. A woman in the café helped him with his bleeding eyebrow, sticking it together with plasters.
Deere returned to the beach and took in the chaos he had previously seen from several thousand feet: ‘It was pretty hectic. The bombing, the strafing. We were taking cover.’ And then he noticed something that disturbed him greatly. British gunners were firing at British planes. He tried to intervene but to no avail.
After a while, he made his way to the mole and tried to get
on a ship, but an army major stood in his path and told him to get in line. Deere argued he had to get home as quickly as possible to rejoin his squadron. ‘For all the good you chaps seem to be doing over here,’ said the major, ‘you might just as well stay on the ground.’ The major kept Deere off one ship, but the New Zealander managed to board the next – where the atmosphere was no less tense. The soldiers were angry.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ they said.
Deere had been flying for ten days straight. He had nothing to apologise for. ‘We were there but you, perhaps, didn’t see us!’
The soldiers were unpleasant – but Deere managed to stay calm. And he was asked to help with aircraft identification. He came on deck and saw the ships’ guns were firing at British aircraft.
The morning rain gave way to heavy cloud. Because of this, the Luftwaffe was forced to stay inland, targeting the town and port. John Ellis of 610 Squadron remembers carrying out two patrols that day, but visibility was poor and he spotted no enemy. Without the Luftwaffe to worry them, his squadron ‘flew low over the beaches from time to time to give the Army a bit of encouragement and show them we were about’. South African Hilton Haarhoff was the rear gunner in a Lockheed Hudson, a four-man reconnaissance aircraft. His pilot, fellow Springbok Ronald Selley, also tried to instil confidence in the troops, by flying low over the ships. ‘Whenever we did this the troops on the ships would give us a wave and grin as we sped past,’ says Haarhoff, adding that Selley was an exhibitionist who liked to fly closer to the water than any other pilot. His navigator did not like it at all, but skimming so low across the Channel paid off when they spotted an upturned table floating in the Channel with three men on top of it, and managed to guide a trawler towards it.
Having been held up by the weather on 28 May, the Luftwaffe was again hampered by low cloud the following morning. Goering was infuriated but, for all his temporal power, he could not roll back the clouds. An improvement in the weather at midday, however, allowed the Germans to launch consecutive major bombing raids, two of which met with no resistance. This was the day when Crested Eagle, as well as many other ships, was sunk, and the mole was mistakenly abandoned for several hours. So successful was the Luftwaffe on the afternoon of 29 May that its chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, changed his opinion. He now believed that the Luftwaffe could destroy the BEF in its Dunkirk pocket.
For Eric Barwell of 264 Squadron, a Defiant pilot, the war began in earnest on this day. ‘Four Stuka dive bombers were flying along,’ he says, ‘more or less line abreast, and three of us Defiants formatted under the gaps. And they just exploded. They had fuel tanks between the pilot and his navigator – they were easy meat.’ It was an extraordinary day for his squadron. It claimed an astonishing thirty-seven enemy aircraft destroyed. A Hurricane pilot who met the Defiant pilots later that day remembers them as ‘cock-a-hoop’. He pointed out that the Germans had probably mistaken them for Hurricanes, and were unlikely to make the same mistake again. The pilot was right – this sortie marked the height of the Defiants’ success. Once the Germans understood that the Defiant’s turret posed its only danger, it became the easiest of kills for German fighters. It would soon be withdrawn from daylight action to become a night fighter.
The exact figures of how many planes were brought down on 29 May conflict heavily. Over-claiming was inevitable and happened on both sides. But an unacknowledged kill can rankle, even years later. John Nicholas of 65 Squadron came across Messerschmitt 110s in their trademark defensive circle. He fired at one and pulled away to the right, only to see in his rear-view mirror that three had broken out of formation to follow him. ‘I decided the only thing I could do,’ he says, ‘was whip round and go down for the centre one. Which I did.’ He fired at it and at the last minute pulled up, but when he looked back, he couldn’t see any planes at all. He returned to Hornchurch and described the scene to his intelligence officer: ‘But he didn’t give me a combat report.’ In 1992, Nicholas found out that another pilot had been credited with this head-on attack. ‘It irritated me at the time!’ says Nicholas. ‘After a while, I thought, Oh what does it matter, it was fifty years ago!’
For Denys Gillam of 616 Squadron, the main problems of flying over Dunkirk were the limited amount of time he could remain there (a little over half an hour) and the difficulty in chancing on the right altitude to intercept the enemy. An afternoon such as this, when the weather conditions suited the Germans, offers a stark glimpse of what might have happened had good weather lasted for an unbroken week.
On Thursday 30 May, sea mist, fog and smoke from burning Dunkirk meant the Stukas were unable to function once again. By the end of the day, almost 54,000 British troops had made it off the beaches or the mole – the most successful day so far. But this did not mean that British squadrons and pilots were finding the operation easy work. ‘To maintain a standing patrol,’ says Gillam, ‘meant that one was flying two or three times a day – about five hours a day starting in the early morning and going on until dusk.’ And in order to encourage the efforts of men such as Gillam, Lord Gort sent a message of gratitude to the RAF. He said their presence was ‘of first importance in preventing embarkation being interrupted’.
All the same, some could not stand the strain. ‘We had the odd case of pilots proving unsuitable,’ Gillam remembers. ‘We had one that went to pieces on the ground just as he was getting into his aeroplane, so the doctor went and hit this chap on the chin – hard. Knocked him out. He didn’t fly again.’
Friday 31 May was, as we have already seen, the most successful day of the evacuation. Eric Barwell, the successful Defiant pilot, was back over Dunkirk. On his first patrol, he saw a fellow Defiant break up into four pieces after its tail was sliced off by another Defiant. He saw no parachute emerge. He went out again later in the day and found himself surrounded by enemy aircraft. He shot one down, but when he attacked another three Heinkel bombers, his coolant system was hit and the cockpit filled with fumes. Jettisoning his hood, he aimed for home – but it soon became clear that he would have either to bail out or to ditch the Defiant on the water.
There were ships below who could pick him and his gunner up – but Barwell was worried that if they bailed out, they risked drifting away from the ships, possibly into a minefield. He chose to ditch the plane into the sea.
Looking down, Barwell saw fishing boats. He could ditch close by – but, even with his survival at stake, it crossed his mind that the fishing boats would be too smelly. He then spotted two destroyers about half a mile apart and figured that if he hit the water between them, one would probably bother to pick him up.
As he descended he was surprised by how difficult it was to gauge his height over a calm sea – and the next thing he knew he was in the water, trying to swim towards the surface.
Once on top, Barwell spotted his gunner, swam over to him, and discovered he was unconscious. He started to swim to the destroyer, a sort of sidestroke pulling the gunner by his parachute. One of the destroyers, he was delighted to see, was making its way towards him.
When he was near, one of the sailors from the destroyer dived into the water and swept the gunner away from Barwell and brought him on board. Once Barwell reached a climbing net near the stern, he was too weak to pull himself up. But somebody helped, and he was safe.
Barwell soon discovered another miracle – the Defiant pilot whose aircraft had broken up into four pieces was standing on deck. Alive and well. He must have parachuted out so low that Barwell had failed to see him. And, at that moment, Barwell’s gunner regained consciousness.
For a while the gunner had no idea where he was. As he looked up, the first thing he saw was the pilot – whom he thought had died – standing in front of him framed by a deep red glow. He was utterly convinced that he was in hell.
He was thankful to discover, soon afterwards, that he was alive – as was the pilot, who was standing in a doorway that reflected the sunset.
In terms of the film, this is an interes
ting account; the character Collins ditches into the sea in his Spitfire, tries to break through his canopy with his flare gun, and is freed when the canopy is smashed from the outside. Barwell, in his Defiant, seems to have been thrown clear – which distinguishes his scenario from Collins’s. So, is it really possible that a Spitfire could stay afloat long enough for a pilot to free himself or be freed?
Jack Potter, a sergeant pilot, was on patrol with 19 Squadron on 1 June. When the squadron flew into twelve Me 110s, he set his sights on one – but his ammunition ran out. There was no reason to stay around, so he started for home, before realising that his Spitfire was damaged. About fifteen miles from the English coast, Potter’s engine seized. He figured his chances of being picked up if he bailed out were poor, but ditching in a metal Spitfire was also highly risky. On balance, though, he felt that this was his only chance, and he aimed towards a small boat.
Straightening out to land, Potter undid his Sutton harness, and inflated his life jacket. ‘On first touching the water,’ he says, ‘the machine skimmed off again, and after one more such landing it dug its nose into the sea.’ He stood up in the cockpit and found that the aircraft was still afloat.
The Spitfire stayed afloat for about ten seconds. Potter tried to keep hold of his parachute because he had been told it functioned like a lifebuoy, but it got caught on the sliding hood and as the Spitfire sank he was pulled down. He managed to break free and started to swim up, and was struck by the tailplane as the Spitfire went down.
The little boat he’d spotted was French, the Jolie Mascotte, and its crew spoke no English. They were trying to get to Dunkirk but were lost. Potter helped them to find the right course.* In return, they gave him food, drink and dry clothes.
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