His injuries, however, were hideous. In hospital, kept on a constant flow of morphia, Hillary was aware of floating on a ‘sea of pain’ as his burns were coated with tannic acid (the idea was that the acid, which formed a crust, would protect the raw flesh from further infection; in fact, it had the opposite effect). His eyesight took a long time to return; but he was aware of nurses weeping around him. Hillary one night had a dream or a vision; it was of his great college friend and fellow pilot Peter Pease. Hillary saw him in his plane, a very slight smile on his face, saw the Messerschmitt flying up behind him, and saw Pease’s plane plunge to the earth. Hillary was next aware of doctors and nurses around his bed trying to calm him. A couple of days later, Hillary recalled, a mutual friend of his and Peter’s visited his bedside and told him the news: Peter was dead. Again, there is a hint, in this and other stories, that flying was almost a halfway house between this life and the life beyond; and that pilots had the ability to see through the clouds that separated them.
Hillary came under the care of a pioneering plastic surgeon, A.H. Micindoe; his reconstruction of the pilot, down to new eyelids, was extraordinary, though there was little that could be done for Hillary’s gnarled, crooked hands. After so many procedures, Hillary went to America in the hope of adding his voice to the efforts to bring the Americans into the war; but he was dissuaded from making public speeches for fear that his disfigurements, which could never have been wholly repaired, would instead advertise the horrors of war. He came back to a posting with Fighter Command.
But a man who has felt that power and exaltation, seen the ‘fairy city’ in the skies above, been through man-to-man combats of Arthurian rigour, when one either kills or is killed; how would it ever have been possible for such a man to stay on the ground? Having tasted the beauty of the skies above, the compulsion to return could certainly be described as addiction. Hillary campaigned in 1942 and 1943 to get back into the cockpit. He was set to work training a new influx of pilots and it was while out flying at night in Scotland that he crashed; both he and his radio operator were killed.10
In Hillary’s 1942 memoir, he had seemed to suggest that there was such a thing as destiny, and that death might not be far off. But this was not fatalism; for why would such a man ever want each flight to be his last? The reverse, surely, was true: the very thing that appeared to give his life real flavour were those transcendent moments high up among the stars.
In September 1940, squadrons were being called in from quieter areas to give some respite to the pilots based in the middle of ‘Hellfire Corner’. But rested pilots – and their repaired aircraft – were still limited in numbers. A number of planes had been battered quite severely and needed proper attention; the same was obviously true for so many of the young crews. At Bentley Priory, intelligence was indicating that the attacks from the air were going to get worse, not ease off. The trend for pilots such as Douglas Bader to disobey controllers and climb much higher than the altitudes they were ordered to – in order, understandably, to have the enemy below rather than above them – was leading, unfortunately, to bombers slipping through far beneath them and destroying their targets before the fighters could stop them.
The day before the start of the Blitz, 6 September 1940, the beleaguered and exhausted denizens of Bentley Priory received a secret visit from the King and Queen. Air Chief Marshal Dowding hosted a special lunch for them in the officers’ mess. On that afternoon, the Germans launched three serious raids; Dowding was obliged to talk to the Queen almost incessantly for forty-five minutes about operational matters, largely because the royal party had to be kept in the subterranean Operations Room as the attack took place.
Gladys Eva, who was also there underground in what the Bentley operatives called the hole, remembered the almost dream-like intensity of coming off a shift at midnight, emerging from the well-lit control room into what should have been the dark night sky – and instead seeing a malign orange glow. In the hole, those who worked around Dowding noticed his pallor and his papery complexion; his gnawing fear was that the German attacks on the airfields would continue, that his Fighter Command would be smashed, and that thereafter, the invasion and subjugation of Britain would begin. When instead the Germans switched tactics – and set out to rain the fires of hell down on London and Britain’s major industrial cities – Dowding could almost have wept with relief. Because paradoxically, these murderous raids brought fresh hope.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Resist Until the Very End’
Thinking back, years later, Lord Dowding said of the start of the German bombing campaign known as the Blitz: ‘It brought an intense feeling of relief to me – intense relief. I could hardly believe that the Germans would have made such a mistake. From then on it was gradually borne upon me that it was a supernatural intervention at that particular time, and that was really the crucial day.’1 At this point of intense crisis, such a sudden blossoming of faith is perfectly understandable. By Saturday, 7 September, when that first thunderclap of destruction broke above London with demonic force, the long-anticipated invasion was understood to be nigh.
Gladys Eva recalls that time in the Operations Room vividly – but as she was eighteen years old at the time, her perspective was rather different. ‘We’d been working downstairs, so we knew what they were doing to London once they started to bomb. You would go out of the hole and the whole of the sky would be lit. There were planes everywhere. You could see London easily from Stanmore. And we had been plotting them, so we knew they were over in vast numbers. But I never remember feeling anything but calm. I just loved the work.
‘In the Filter Room they soon put me up on the balcony,’ continues Mrs Eva. ‘It was a responsibility, of course. When you put a plot on the table, you were responsible for putting it in the right place. But when you were up on the balcony, you had to be even more so.’ Filter officers from both the air force and Coastal Command would be present, and they would soon know if any queries were coming through from the stations as to the accuracy of the information they were receiving. ‘They would all be there because they would want and need the information for different reasons. If you look at a filter table, if you are only an eighth of an inch out, you are a mile or two out. You either had the knack to do it or you didn’t. And I was lucky. You didn’t have to be clever – I was just able to do it.’
Stanmore might have looked sufficiently far from London – high to the northwest on a wooded escarpment – not to be at paramount risk during the bombing campaigns. But says Mrs Eva, there was a lingering sense of vulnerability about the establishment; a sense that was sharpened with one particular incident. At one point, WAAFs were billeted close to an old convent.
‘We were opposite it, and when we went on duty, a coach used to come up the Elstree Road and pick us up. One night, in a radio broadcast, Lord Haw Haw described in detail the comings and goings of this coach. And the Germans started to bomb. But they didn’t bomb us – instead they got part of the convent.’
The tragedy of the nuns’ deaths aside, says Mrs Eva, there was also a crucial security aspect. ‘If they had hit one of our coaches, that would have been the Filter Room at that time – it would have been very, very difficult to carry on. But we didn’t care. We didn’t care about anything.
‘We were only kids,’ concludes Mrs Eva. ‘We weren’t fully grown. It was damn tiring. And off-duty you had nobody to do your washing and ironing and clean your room. We had all that to do as well on top of everything else. So you had to have a break. You had to get away and have a laugh somewhere. You just had to – otherwise you couldn’t do the work. We used to go up to London. Probably do a show or go and have a meal somewhere.’
Years later, John Willoughby de Broke, a duty controller in 11 Group Operations Room who later rose to be air commodore, told Dowding’s biographer, Robert Wright:
How lucky it was for those of us who were doing the controlling that we did not fully realise at the time what a desperately serious b
attle for existence this country was fighting. If we had, we might have felt an undue sense of personal responsibility in our actions. We regarded all that we did … as being part of our daily routine in life, and we carried out to the best of our ability our instructions … But none of us on my level quite realised the seriousness of the situation … we did not have access to the information that would have given us an overall picture.2
One might also see it as something of a mercy; understanding that the job is serious is one thing, but feeling personally responsible for the fate of each and every one of your fellow citizens is another.
But there were some in Fighter Command who were now foaming in their eagerness to bring the enemy down; and on the day that the Blitz began, Douglas Bader of 12 Squadron led a big wing formation into the skies above northeast London, once more disobeying instructions about the altitude to reach. In his biographer’s account of the battle, Bader’s squadron comrades struggled to keep up with him in the sky as they all took on ‘a mess’ of about seventy Dorniers and 110s. The scramble and the confusion worsened. ‘It didn’t come off – we were too slow,’ Bader told Leigh-Mallory on his return in his badly damaged plane. ‘If only we could get off earlier, we could be on top and ready for them. Why can’t we do that, sir?’3
It was on that same day, 7 September 1940, that an extraordinary demand was also made of Air Vice Marshal Keith Park by the Air Ministry. According to Park himself, his superiors ordered him to get ready to demolish every single aerodrome – and dismantle every single runway – in southeast England. If the invasion was to begin, the Germans would use these airfields. The only way to hold them off would be to make it impossible for them to land. Park was horrified by the idea, and he instantly refused. As his biography relates, he told his superiors that resistance to invasion would be utterly impossible without the airfields and ‘he was determined to resist until the very end.’ More than that, he argued, such a move would have a lethal effect upon morale; it would look like desperation, and giving up hope.
Also according to Orange, ‘Churchill himself telephoned Park at Uxbridge that day to tell him of the invasion alert. He had not seemed particularly perturbed and neither was Park. Provided that his fighter force could still be controlled from the ground, he did not fear an invasion attempt because he believed the German fighters could be held off by part of his force, leaving the rest free to shoot down bombers and transport aircraft at will.’4
Throughout that summer, Air Vice Marshal Park had updated a careful and comprehensive (and, of course, highly classified) document for 11 Group, detailing closely what all personnel should do in the event of German invasion. Even as late as mid-September 1940, he was issuing new versions. ‘Fighter role in the event of invasion,’ he wrote. ‘Fighter units will retain their full normal functions but some or all the units in 11 Group may be required to switch to other tasks … An important role of our fighter defences in the event of an invasion will be the protection of our naval forces and their bases.’ He went on to envisage the form that the German assault would take, and what his pilots could do to help repulse it. ‘Fighter cover to be given to the bomber aircraft which will be attacking enemy’s convoys and landing craft. Fighter cover for our Naval forces attacking the enemy’s convoys … fighter protection may have to be afforded to our own troops against the attacks of enemy dive bombers which may be operating in conjunction with a landing or covering a lodgement against our counter-offensive.’
And what if the invading Germans were to breach all forward defences? What if they were to start spreading like a contagion closer to the nerve centres of control and power? What if RAF Uxbridge itself were to be destroyed or overrun? What should the fighter pilots do then?
Group control will be maintained as long as telephone communications and Sector Operations Rooms are intact. If Group control is not possible, Sector Commanders will immediately take control and operate their squadrons on the lines given above. If Sector control is not possible, the Senior Officer or Squadron Commander at forward aerodromes will act on his own initiative … All squadron and flight commanders must impress upon their pilots that to defeat an attempted invasion will demand the utmost physical and mental effort from all flying personnel.
Park concluded on a note of implacable optimism: ‘An attempted invasion will probably be defeated in 24, or at most 72 hours, and whilst an invasion is being attempted, all pilots must be prepared to do six patrols a day.’
In some ways it is quite easy to see how – at this ultimate moment of national emergency – Air Vice Marshal Park’s position at the forefront of the expected invasion, with his seemingly natural and confident command of how to beat the enemy back, would have been a source of immense frustration to a man such as Trafford Leigh-Mallory, forced to look on from the distance of the Midlands. Park’s defensive tactics did not address the central RAF schism: why not take the first available opportunity to take the fight to the Germans? To annihilate their air force before they got the chance to do exactly that to the British?
Park’s pivotal position meant that he also attracted attention from elsewhere. Naturally Churchill was hugely interested in the workings of Fighter Command. And he was to visit Air Vice Marshal Park at Uxbridge the week after the Blitz began, turning up and then modestly announcing that if he was going to be in the way, then he could stay in his car and catch up with paperwork. Of course, Churchill was instantly welcomed in, and taken underground into the Operations Room, the mirror image of the set-up at Bentley Priory. The Prime Minister was advised that the air-conditioning – fine though it was – could not quite cope with the fumes from his cigar and so he had to let it go out. But as Churchill took his seat above the vast map, the German attack upon London began. Air Vice Marshal Park prowled around the table as the plots came in. Churchill commented on the vast number of enemy planes that appeared to be swooping in. Park quietly assured him that ‘they would be met.’ But then the Prime Minister watched as Park marshalled his very thin resources – the sparse numbers of fighters at his disposal, the backup in readiness from 12 Group. And it was brought home to Churchill what a slender thread this entire enterprise dangled from. What no one could quite know was that this day – 15 September – was also a turning point for the Luftwaffe.
In spite of the silent ill-will between 12 Group – Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader – and Air Chief Marshal Dowding, the flying on that Saturday from the point of view of all pilots was a breathtaking feat. Certainly the bombers got through, roaring angrily up the serpentine silver trail of the Thames Estuary to drop a massive weight of explosives on civilians below. But Bader and his big wing of five squadrons, all in formation, took them on with gusto; and those that evaded his fury met – on their way back towards the Channel – Park’s 11 Group fighters, who had been waiting in ambush. Churchill had seen Park’s acute anxiety that day, as the commander paced around the map table, listening for reports of losses and accounts of damage and devastation. But the Prime Minister had also seen confidence: the possibly irrational faith that despite being hugely outnumbered, the British would wear the Luftwaffe down to a point where they would consider invasion to be a most unattractive prospect.
Extraordinarily, Park was exactly right; the fury of the air fights that day, the losses sustained by the Germans, the exhaustion of the Luftwaffe pilots who limped back across the darkening Channel to their bases in France, in essence decided it for Hitler. Operation Sea Lion, the proposed plan for the Nazi invasion of Britain, remained on the table that autumn, and was mentioned in occasional messages decrypted by Bletchley Park. But Park and Dowding and Leigh-Mallory and the pilots of Fighter Command had made the case most decisively; after three months of sustained fighting, the Germans seemed no closer to gaining air supremacy over Britain. Without that, an invasion could not be counted on to succeed.
Yet the ferocity of the bombing campaign against cities now took the war to a whole new level. Where once the targets had been tactical – convoys, a
erodromes – they were now civilians and their homes. The images are so familiar now that we unwittingly shut out the full weight and the horror. That first big night of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe might at least have claimed to be aiming to paralyse trade; the swoop on the mighty east London docks, the eighteenth-century warehouses filled with spices and timber. But the raids that were to follow – possibly the result of German pilots’ failure to get a fix on their real targets – seemed cruelly random. Suburbs such as Kingston and Richmond and Purley were bombed, as were streets and terraces in the well-to-do district of Chelsea. And all the while, incendiaries and explosives continued to pour down upon the heads of poorer Londoners in areas such as Lambeth and Stepney.
The destruction was not just that of lives and homes; the Germans aimed for specific targets such as big railway stations, electricity stations and substations, telephone exchanges and large groups of gasholders. The aim was to render large areas completely uninhabitable. It was a continuation of the effort to wear down the morale of the working population, particularly by striking at the heavily working-class East End. Indeed, in the smarter political and artistic salons of the day – such as those frequented by Harold Nicolson and Virginia Woolf – there was some discussion of rumours that a socialist revolution was nigh, and that there was only so much the cockneys would take before attempting to seize control.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 21