by Nick Thomas
During the weeks and months that followed, the squadron spent more time on interception exercises and mock combats: ‘We trained flying in the “vic” formation, using the RAF’s standard air attacks, which were designed to take on unescorted bomber formations.’
The RAF’s Fighter Attack Nos. 1–6 were drilled into fighter pilots during their advanced training and were the cornerstone of squadron exercises. Aerial combat had, however, moved on, with new techniques having been used during the Spanish Civil War. The Bf 109 pilots flew in pairs (the Rotte), or in two pairs (Schwarme), which allowed them to search the sky for their prey. The RAF’s tight ‘vic’ meant that only the leader was able to concentrate on looking out for the enemy, the rest of the formation was too busy avoiding collisions. For the time being, at least, Brothers continued flying the RAF’s prescribed attacks, but explained that once real combat came this would all change, ‘we’d throw away the idea of Fighter Command Attack No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, different formations and so on, because they didn’t fit in with what the enemy was doing.’
Wing Commander Richard ‘Dickie’ Grice, DFC (later Air Commodore Grice, DFC, OBE), assumed command of Biggin Hill on 15 November 1938. Grice, a First World War fighter ace with No. 8 Squadron, had, along with Freddie West (Captain F.M.F. West, VC, MC), witnessed the final air battle of Manfred von Richthofen. Another former squadron member was Leigh-Mallory (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, KCB, DSO and Bar).
Biggin Hill was on the flight path of Lufthansa aircraft bound for Croydon airport and its preparations for war were closely monitored. On one occasion a Lufthansa aircraft, a Junkers transport, flew so low that a signal mortar was discharged in its direction, causing it to veer off. Lufthansa reconnaissance photographs were discovered in German archives following the end of the war, confirming that during 1939 some of the civilian flights were being used for spying purposes.
The modifications included the excavation of slit trenches and construction of sandbag emplacements, and the planting of trees and shrubs to help break up the linear outlines of the station’s ground-plan. The white concrete aprons and the parade ground had been disguised by covering them with bitumen and granite chip. Meanwhile, the 90th AA Regiment was posted to provide a defence against enemy raiders seeing their first ‘action’ on 3 September 1939, when they opened fire on No. 601 Squadron’s Blenheims returning from a false alarm raised by a listening station.
On 2 November 1938, Wing Commander R. Pyne, DFC, left the squadron on attachment to the Air Ministry, Squadron Leader Thomas Bain ‘Mexican Pete’ Prickman, being appointed to command. ‘Why “Mexican Pete”? Well, everyone in the RAF had a nickname, Prickman’s came from his wearing a non-regulation moustache.’
It was at about this time that the station began receiving visits from a VIP:
‘During 1938 Winston Churchill occasionally used to come into the mess at Biggin Hill … The door would open just before six o’clock and he’d say, “Would you mind turning on the radio, so that I can hear the six o’clock news?”’ Evidently aircraft recognition was not Churchill’s forte as, ‘he’d ask us about our Supermarine Spitfires, whether we were content with them, and that sort of thing. He’d spend a few minutes with us, then he’d get on his way home, we never told him that we were actually flying Hawker Hurricanes.’
By November 1938 both Nos. 32 and 79 Squadrons were flying Hurricanes, No. 79 Squadron from early December, then under the command of Squadron Leader G.D. Emms.
Meanwhile, Brothers’ promotion to the rank of flying officer was announced in the London Gazette on 27 October 1938. Pete was by now an old hand on the squadron, ‘… and, as senior pilots departed to newly-formed squadrons, I became a Flight Commander that December.’
Now in a position to lead rather than be led, Brothers felt able to pass on some of the tricks that he had learnt from George Yuill. These included how to avoid blacking out in a tight turn, or when pulling out of a dive: ‘By putting your head on your shoulder you don’t get such a direct flow of draining blood from the head, like putting a kink in a pipe.’
Brothers had found that, with practice, the technique could allow him to pull another couple of ‘G’ before his vision greyed out, ‘I used to tell the chaps in the squadron; it’s a good trick and it worked. I bought myself an accelerometer which I hung in my Hurricane, showing the “G” Force.’
Brothers tested his purchase by putting his aircraft into a steep dive, pulling out hard, ‘and [I was] just about blacking out at about 6 and a half “G” or so. And then tried the same thing with my head on one side and found I was doing about 8 G, so it worked all right.’
The New Year saw Brothers steadily building up his hours on the Hurricane, while further opportunities to hone his gunnery skills came with seven visits to the ranges, made between February and late April. The results of these test firings would convince Brothers that to have the best chance of bringing an enemy aircraft down his guns needed realigning, ‘Our machine guns were arranged to fire a pattern at 250 yards, although some of us decided to have our guns turned in to concentrate at a point. Usually, we tried to get much closer than 250 yards.’
The importance of the squadron’s tight training programme was brought into greater focus when on 15 March 1939, Hitler seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia and Moravia), tearing to shreds the Munich ‘agreement’ on which Chamberlain had placed so much store. In response to the deepening world crisis the station was put on alert and the aircraft were dispersed around the airfield. In the event, Europe once again stepped back from the abyss.
Brothers, meanwhile, had plans of his own. One of the haunts of the young officers was Pitt’s Cottage, a restaurant and tea shop in nearby Westerham, owned and run by Elsie Wilson. Here Brothers met a young woman, Annette Wilson, Elsie’s niece, ‘I happened to meet her and that was it’. Following a brief courtship he proposed, much to his future father-in-law’s dismay: ‘My wife’s father was not very much in favour of this, “Fly boys – all they do is get killed – not a good idea.”’
Marriage in the Armed Forces was not exactly frowned upon, but like everything else, there were accepted protocols to be observed: ‘You had to be a squadron leader or aged twenty-eight to be able to get married and we were both twenty-one’.
Brothers decided he would go to Wing Commander Grice and ask for his permission. Grice replied, ‘You are a bit bloody young aren’t you? What if I said no?’
Brothers confessed that this was not exactly the reply he had anticipated, ‘And being a stupid Lancastrian who can’t resist saying his piece I said, “It would be a bit difficult to send you an invitation to the wedding Sir!”’
Fortunately Grice was not without a sense of humour, as Brothers recalled, ‘He roared with laughter, fortunately, and allowed it’.
The couple married on 22 March 1939, Pete’s great friend and fellow pilot John ‘Millie the Mooch’ Milner acting as best man. Originally, Pete had intended that the couple should travel to Germany, revisiting some of the places he had toured in his teens. Due to the prevailing international tension, however, Wing Commander Grice strongly advised against such a plan, instructing Brothers, ‘You can’t leave the country’, adding that he was to remain ‘near a telephone at all times.’ Consequently the couple honeymooned in Cornwall.
The days passed quickly and the newly-weds’ thoughts soon turned to married life back at Biggin Hill, ‘I got a telegram the day before we were due to come back, it was from my deputy who was running my flight in my absence to say, “Congratulations! You are promoted to flight lieutenant”’.
Brothers’ pay was now twenty shillings and two pence a day, a big jump from fourteen shillings, and, as Pete joked, very necessary, as he now had responsibilities, ‘I had to keep the bull terrier (Merlin) after all, and he only ate steak!’
Accommodation was something of a bugbear. Despite having gone through the appropriate channels, the couple were not able to move into the married quarters, which re
mained the preserve of those who conformed to tradition: ‘you were entirely on your own. Well, you were living in sin, officially, you weren’t supposed to be married. We rented a little bungalow on the edge of Biggin Hill for twenty-five bob a week. My father, bless him, bought us some carpets and furniture.’
Back at Biggin Hill, with the display season fast approaching, Brothers was involved in rehearsals on 16, 17 & 19 April, before putting his training into practice the following day when a record crowd of 25,000 spectators enjoyed the station’s Empire Air Day airshow. Biggin Hill had changed significantly since the previous year’s open day. Their aircraft were no longer set out in neat rows but dispersed across the aerodrome, while the hangars had been camouflaged.
Two days later the situation in Europe took another ominous twist when Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini signed the military alliance known as the ‘Pact of Steel’. The Fascist alliance was a real threat to France and Britain, as Italy, with its colonial interests in North Africa, had a very strong Mediterranean Fleet, while its air force was developing monoplanes which would rival the RAF’s Hawker Hurricane.
Over 8 and 9 July, the squadron undertook No. 11 Group’s Preliminary Air Exercises, made in conjunction with aircraft of Bomber Command.
Air Defence warning and control systems had greatly improved over the previous months and senior officers from No. 11 Group were able to report sixty per cent interception rates. None of the squadrons, however, gained any experience of attacking large formations of bombers, as Air Chief Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, KCB, CMG, DSO, MC, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, still refused to make sufficient aircraft available. Meanwhile, the controllers were under less pressure to hold fighter aircraft in reserve to meet second and third waves of bombers, and thus were able to deploy every available fighter, something which could never have been done under real combat conditions.
At the time, Brothers was off the flying rota. Meanwhile, No. 32 Squadron was deployed in the night fighter role during the annual Home Defence air exercise held between 8–11 August 1939.
Winston Churchill and Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air, observed the daylight operations from Biggin Hill during 10 August. A review of the exercise left both confident that daylight raids would eventually prove too costly to the Luftwaffe, Sir Kingsley Wood suggesting up to twenty per cent enemy casualty rates, which would reduce the enemy to less accurate night raids.
No. 11 Group was able to report: ‘RDF information and plotting throughout the exercise was consistently first-rate and enabled interceptions to be effected on the coast.’
Fighter Command’s night fighter defence capabilities, however, were rudimentary. The Hawker Hurricane lacked any form of on-board system to locate a target at night, relying on visual contacts and ground based radar, which could only plot a raid as it approached the coast. The aircraft’s short exhaust stubs reduced forward visibility, the flames dazzling the pilot, particularly when throttling back on landing. Their pilots were, however, some of the most experienced when it came to controller-led interceptions.
Simulated raids involving 500 aircraft were made against London and other targets during the night of the 10/11 August. Early in the proceedings, Flying Officer Harold Stewart Olding was ordered up to observe the blackout, but after circling, his engine cut out. Grice ordered the fire tender off in the direction of the crash, while Flying Officer Arthur Robin ‘Woolly’ Buchanan-Wollaston took off to illuminate the wreckage with a locating flare. Tragically, his Hurricane crashed into the top of Tatsfield Hill, only a few hundred feet away from the first Hurricane – both pilots were killed outright. It was a tragic blow for everyone on the squadron, and a poignant reminder of the ever-present dangers.
But there was little time to morn, as events abroad continued to move at a fast pace and the very real threat of a world war lay on the near horizon. Churchill had always warned that German expansionism would not end at Czechoslovakia’s borders. Growing tension now lay around the question of the port of Danzig (Gdansk), ceded to Poland under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The port’s land corridor cut East Prussia off from the Fatherland.
Herr Hitler favoured an uprising by armed pro-Nazi sympathizers from within the predominantly Germanic population, allowing Danzig to be reabsorbed. On 13 August the Polish Government issued an ultimatum demanding the reinstatement of border controls. Meanwhile, on 23 August, it was announced that Germany and Russia had signed the ‘non-aggression’ treaty known to history as the ‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’. In response, Great Britain and Poland signed a mutual assistance treaty two days later. Hitler was not deterred by what he considered to be a hollow display of unity.
On 27 August work began at Biggin Hill on sandbagging the fighter pens, while a dummy airfield was under construction to the east of Lullingstone. Training was once again stepped up a gear. Brothers recalled that, ‘We flew interception practice up to 30,000ft, made fighter attacks according to the book, and that sort of thing.’
The RAFs three main Fighter Air Attacks, as practiced can be summarized thus:
No. 1 Attack:
A succession of fighter aircraft – usually three or six – attacking from astern, against a single bomber.
No. 2 Attack:
Two or more fighter aircraft attacking in line abreast against a single bomber aircraft.
No. 3 Attack:
Three fighter aircraft attacking a single bomber simultaneously from the rear, beam and rear quarter.
While these worked well against the single bomber which Bomber Command supplied for exercises, they would soon prove to be near useless against mass formations protected by fighter escorts.
The ground crews became well practiced in refuelling and rearming the aircraft and scrambling their pilots off in good time: ‘You were a well-grounded team because you all knew each other intimately, they were a good bunch of characters and you were all after the same thing.’
With Europe looking to be edging towards war, the British Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, met with Hitler. The German Dictator refused to give up his demands. With German forces massing on the border, Poland began a general mobilization on 30 August.
On the following day Adolf Hitler issued his Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War. The document outlined Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Poland and the initial phase of the campaign against France and Britain, stating that:
‘If Britain and France open hostilities against Germany, it will be the duty of the Wehrmacht formations operating in the west to conserve their forces as much as possible and thus maintain the conditions for a victorious conclusion of the operations against Poland. The right to order offensive operations is reserved absolutely to me.
‘The Navy will carry on warfare against merchant shipping, directed mainly at England.
‘The Air Force is, in the first place, to prevent the French and British Air Forces from attacking the German Army and German territory.
‘In conducting the war against England, preparations are to be made for the use of the Luftwaffe in disrupting British supplies by sea, the armaments industry, and the transport of troops to France. A favourable opportunity is to be taken for an effective attack on massed British naval units, especially against battleships and aircraft carriers. The decision regarding attacks on London is reserved to me.’
At dawn on 1 September, Wehrmacht forces invaded Poland, closely supported by the Luftwaffe. Meanwhile, Danzig came under naval bombardment.
At 0540 hours Adolf Hitler’s message to his Armed Forces was broadcast:
‘Poland has refused my offer for a friendly settlement of our relation as neighbours. Instead she has taken up arms.
‘I am left with no other means than from now on opposing force with force.’
As the full enormity of the morning’s events sank in, hurried meetings were held in Whitehall and at the Ministry of Defence. Orders were issued to Biggin Hill, bringing it to a state of Readiness and all personnel w
ere recalled with immediate effect.
Later that day a sombre Neville Chamberlain addressed Parliament stating that if His Majesty’s Government did not receive assurances of the withdrawal of Germany’s armed forces: ‘His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom will without hesitation fulfil its obligations to Poland.’
In a last-ditch hope of averting war, the Prime Minister made an appeal to right-thinking Germans: ‘We have no quarrel with the German people, except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government. As long as that Government exists and pursues the methods it has so persistently followed during the last two years, there will be no peace in Europe.’
At 2000 hours on 1 September 1939, in line with the other Services, orders were issued for the general mobilization of the Royal Air Force, calling up members of the RAF Reserve and RAF Volunteer Reserve.
Meanwhile, the RAF had already begun secretly taking its first positive actions and deployed ten light bomber squadrons and two squadrons of Hurricanes in France. These units were to form part of the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), with their HQ at Rheims; the RAF squadrons were mainly based to the east and north-east. The fighter unit’s role was to protect the Maginot Line, while the Fairey Battle and Blenheim bombers proved a woefully inadequate strike force. Also operating out of France during this early phase would be the Air Component.