‘Occasionally I was conscious of the difference,’ added Mrs Lockington, ‘and felt embarrassed when my friend Anne invited me to her home as I knew I could not invite her back. Consequently I did not accept the invitation.’ Mrs Lockington was also to witness – in microcosmic form – the shifting tectonic plates of the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA. ‘Debden was a station which was in the process of being taken over by the Americans,’ she recalled. ‘And these Yanks definitely added a new dimension to our lives. My friend Anne Sidebotham and I went out with a couple on one occasion. I remember their names were Buzz and Duck! I also remember how annoyed I was when my “partner” – I think he was Buzz – casually said how the Americans would leave an army of occupation here after the war. I also remember wondering how easy it would be to get an American interested in me so I went out of my way to flirt with one. I wish I hadn’t! I had a very difficult time trying to get rid of him. That taught me a lesson.’6
For other women, British airmen still had as much allure as Americans. Mary Wesley, later a hugely successful novelist, had an illicit tryst in a London hotel with a squadron leader, though she noted some years later that any erotic charge was dissipated by his ‘stockbroker’ technique. Elsewhere, many dreamy preconceptions of Fighter Command life were swiftly dissolved, whatever the social background of the WAAF. Joan Wyndham, who came from a wealthy though dissipated family – classics of the Chelsea Bohemian genre – joined up in 1941 with a range of frankly amorous intentions, having done everything in her power to be ‘de-virginised’ in London during the Blitz. First, there was the ice-water shock of the WAAF induction at West Drayton; all this out of the way, Joan Wyndham’s quest for lively physical romance was on. Posted to Scotland, she conceived a fierce, if short-lived, lust for a pilot called Lovat; it was only when she had the chance to inspect him at closer quarters off-duty – he favoured aristocratic tweed, pin-stripe trousers, orange suede waistcoat and a chin that had the potential to double – that she dropped the matter.
She was also posted, like Eileen Younghusband, to RAF Watnall. There she met a Spitfire pilot whose face had been badly burned when he was forced to make a crash-landing. Unlike the pilot in Scotland, though, here there was a powerful charge. She told her diary that he ‘was very good-looking in spite of it’. They went out on dates; Wyndham, unusually for the time, took the initiative in the first kiss – the pilot was too intensely self-conscious about what he saw as his disfigurements. Joan told him that his face was beautiful; then she persuaded him, under cover of dark, to come with her to the perimeter of the airfield, where they proceeded to have sex. The atmosphere was certainly much more conducive than her posting to Fighter Command itself in Stanmore. She immediately noted that the drawback of being in such a place was paradoxically the absence of fighter pilots, all based elsewhere. Instead, there were either older, former pilots–crusty commanding officers – or administrators (‘wingless wonders’ as she crossly put it).7
Romantic entanglements aside, thousands of women like her, in bases up and down the country, were quietly and skilfully upholding the infrastructure of a vast and complex enterprise. Indeed, the huge importance – and concomitant anxieties, tensions, and moments of euphoric release – would prove so central to the lives of these women that what came after the war was often shatteringly disappointing, to the extent that among a few, very serious depression set in. But for the moment, in that high summer of 1941, with Germany launching its surprise attack on Russia, opening up an eastern front that took a great deal of the Luftwaffe with it, and with the RAF striving for more permanent mastery over its own and neighbouring skies, there was for men and women alike a giddying sense of possibility, a feeling like a thermal current carrying them aloft.
Chapter Nineteen
Knitting, Smoking and Great Literature
The Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra – the vinegary, pithy, witty William Connor – had warned earlier in 1941 that the great man Douglas Bader had already done quite enough; that the double amputee had shown fantastic valour but now should be held back a little, simply for fear of losing such a vital asset. Bader – not the most natural of Daily Mirror readers – was apparently incensed by the sentiment. The thrill and exhilaration of Rhubarbs and Circuses was not something to be ducked from. Moreover, we see in Bader’s almost pathological restlessness some essential fear of stillness. Certainly he wanted to fly out there and win the war, but there was more to it than that; almost a deliberate refusal to sink into any kind of reflectiveness.
He knew – as did every pilot – that the end could come at any moment. Yet, as his biographer Paul Brickhill wrote, ‘everyone felt he [Bader] was invincible, and that this power shielded those who flew with him.’ The feeling was to disintegrate in the late summer of 1941. As he had done so many times previously, Bader flew out to France, near Le Touquet, in order to lure German fighters up into the sky. The more of them he managed to shoot down, the more stretched the Luftwaffe would find itself between the two fronts. Below him the Messerschmitts materialised. Somehow Bader was pulled away from the rest of his wing and climbed to 7,315 metres (24,000 feet) – ‘deadly to be alone in this dangerous sky’. What had started as a mission to entrap German fighters was now turned on Bader; unable to resist the chance to chase more Messerschmitts that had appeared, he had failed to realise the nature of what was on his tail. ‘Something hit him,’ wrote Brickhill. Bader was bewildered to suddenly find himself plummeting in a spiral; looking back, he realised that the rear half of his Spitfire had simply disappeared.
First there was oxygen-starved befuddlement; a sense that he could just stay in the warm cockpit. Then, with horror, he realised what was happening and fought to free the parachute. By now what was left of the plane was spinning wildly; utterly disorientated, Bader struggled to see as he whirled. Then, after a metallic snap, he was suddenly aware of floating free; a moment of extraordinary and illusory tranquillity, a sense of stillness, and an overwhelming desire to sleep. He remembered to pull the parachute cord just in time.
In the crisis to get out of the cockpit, he had lost one of his prosthetic legs. Now, with his parachute open, he was floating down to earth over France. His trousers were in ribbons. A couple of agricultural labourers watched him incuriously. The landing brought unconsciousness and when he surfaced, he had been captured by the Germans.
‘Legless air pilot a prisoner’, reported the Manchester Guardian. The ‘destroyer of over fifteen Nazi planes’ had been confirmed as a prisoner of war, being eventually held at Colditz Castle in Germany. A little later after the crash, Bader’s wife divulged the contents of a letter that he had sent her, explaining how the disaster had happened. In fact, Bader was rather gracious about his early treatment, and rightly so; his German captors had managed to find both the wreckage of his plane and his missing leg. They were even able to fix him up so that both legs were restored to their pre-crash condition. (A little later on, his endless harrying of his captors caused them at one point to confiscate those legs). But tellingly, he received curious visits from aristocratic Luftwaffe pilots – ‘Count von Someone-or-other’, as he put it. They wanted to talk aeroplanes; not by way of interrogation but simply as fascinated pilots. They were gripped by Spitfires. They were also understandably gripped by Bader’s amputated limbs; it is conceivable that they had known about this before their illustrious prisoner arrived. They were intrigued to know how this changed his flying techniques. Again, we see here almost a brotherhood of the air, and indeed of knights, openly admiring the skills of their rivals.
In the lengthening days of spring and summer 1941, the remorseless Luftwaffe onslaughts on London and the major industrial cities diminished in intensity; in a matter of weeks, many of those German pilots would be needed on quite another front. But for the women of Fighter Command, there was no let-up; vigilance at Bentley Priory – now under the control of Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas – was still absolute.
There came a point
where, as a filter officer, Eileen Younghusband was transferred to the station where so many of the original leaps in radar development had taken place: Bawdsey Manor, on the Norfolk coast. If Rudloe in the West Country seemed a little remote, Bawdsey seemed to many young women working there to be the very edge of the world.
‘Once they had got in there, they were captive virtually,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘We had to learn to shoot while we were there.’ This was no idle whim, a means of beguiling the time: it was about the ever-present fear of invasion, and the particular vulnerability of this frequently foggy patch of the country.
‘Bawdsey was very much cut off. One day we were taken down to the coast and I think there was a sort of cliff and down below was the beach and it was all mines and barbed wire – no one was using that beach. We were taught to shoot – Bren or sten – from the hip. And we got complaints from the fishermen out at sea, saying they were being peppered!
‘The point was,’ she continues, ‘that that was one of the places where they thought the Germans would land. The Highland Regiment was in charge there – they were protecting us because it was very vulnerable. And it was very strictly controlled going in and out. If the Germans had known what was being done there, then it would definitely have been a target. And if they had landed, they would have come in and shot us all whether we were men or women, because we were in battle dress.’
Both at Rudloe and at Bawdsey Manor, the need for pressure valves was terrific. But then it is easy to forget that the young, when they laugh, tend to do so very intensely. ‘One thing I can particularly remember: if you came off duty and you had had a hectic night – you would almost be hysterical when you were having breakfast. The slightest thing would make you laugh. We all went out when we could, we went dancing when we could, we had dances at the mess. That’s how I met Peter, he brought his band there from Northolt.’
Peter was Eileen’s husband-to-be. Now, of course, the abiding image of wartime romance is that perhaps of David Niven and Kim Hunter in A Matter of Life and Death, in which Hunter’s radio operator falls for RAF pilot Niven just at the point when he is transmitting what he thinks is his final message from a plane that is diving into the sea; in other words, swooning romance touched with a profound note of mortality. This being said, a great many courtships were obviously much more light-hearted. Eileen Younghusband could see it going on all around her during her time as an officer.
‘A lot of them had affairs,’ she says. ‘Especially the air crew. Now that was much more with the ops girls – we filterers didn’t see many pilots. The time I met more pilots was when I was at 10 Group, Rudloe Manor. And at 10 Group, there was a mixed officers’ mess when I was there. So you actually had the men with you, that’s when Rex Harrison was there.’ The actor Rex Harrison – he had hoped to be a pilot but poor eyesight had debarred him, so instead he became a flight officer, guiding crews via radar – and Eileen Younghusband did not see eye to eye. She recalled that every time they sat opposite each other taking breakfast in the mess, he would never deign to say a single word to her. As a result, she considered him to be one of the rudest men she had ever met.
More agreeable company was ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham. ‘If the pilots had had several sessions they’d been flying, they were often sent back to group during their relaxation period and given some sort of job. But this also gave them the chance to see how the Ops and Filter Room worked. Because lots of pilots never knew anything about it.’
For Patricia Clark, the quieter night shifts at Rudloe Manor opened the door for a spectacular literary career. It all started with the circumstances by which she came – very rare for a young woman this, especially in wartime – to be the owner of a car. Splendid though it was, she wondered how she would be able to afford the petrol for it. She needed more money.
‘I started writing for the magazine that I had been working on before. As a junior there, one of my jobs was to read unsolicited material to see if it was suitable to be considered by someone higher up than me. And there were criteria – the hero mustn’t be divorced, no sex past the bedroom door, no illegitimacy, proper behaviour. So I knew exactly what was acceptable for short stories and what was turned down.
‘I wrote one story, sent it in, and they paid me £10, which was an absolute fortune. It was about a month’s pay. So I continued every time I could, which really began my writing career.
‘You never knew what would happen from day to day. We were very young. The people I met were all new to me. Everything was an experience. From a writing point of view – well, I wasn’t aware then that I would be absorbing people’s stories, what was going on. I think it helped me a lot.’
For Gladys Eva, the lull in Luftwaffe activity led to some surprising recreational opportunities throughout the night shifts. ‘Generally, there was knitting and sewing. But we had one very bad spell of weather. No one flying. And guess what I was doing? Well, there was a voice from the balcony: “Anybody down there play bridge?” I said: “I do, sir.” So I was up on the balcony playing bridge.’
By summer 1941, as increasing numbers of troops set sail for Alexandria and Cairo, and engagements in the desert between Germans and Italians and the British intensified, the broad focus of the conflict for the British was moving to the sands of the Middle East and away from the RAF squadrons based at home. There were other developments too; later in the year – in what proved another fine propaganda coup for the Air Ministry – half a dozen Fighter Command pilots were attached to units of the United States Army Air Corps, morale-boosting evidence of the concrete existence of the ‘special relationship’. Among the pilots was the greatly admired Wing Commander Malan of 74 Squadron. The news of his transfer gave two signals to the public: first that the German bombing threat had abated sufficiently for British expertise to be redeployed, and second that the Americans greatly admired the work that these pilots had done throughout the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.
Throughout the sorties over France, the Air Ministry were careful to let it be known that old alliances and friendships had not been forgotten, in spite of the military situation. A couple of Hurricane pilots sweeping over northern France ‘passed low over a church from which the congregation was just filing out’, it was reported. ‘The British pilots pushed back their hoods and waved. The French people waved back.’
In later years, senior figures became aware that these adventures across the Channel were being criticised as a waste of time and men, vainglorious gestures that made little or no difference to the conflict. Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas addressed these accusations fiercely in a secret memo not long after the war ended:
Let me say one word about the sweeps carried out by Fighter Command in 1941. It was said at the time and after that these were a waste of effort. I cannot agree with this view … I would make the following points in their favour. First, the question of morale. I hold that no air force can achieve air superiority by remaining continually on the defensive and confining their efforts to the defence of their own country. The sweeps, therefore, were an essential preliminary to a switchover to the offensive, and in this sense, they were the forerunners of the invasion of the continent.
Secondly, he added, such missions taught Fighter Command many tactical lessons; and thirdly, Fighter Command’s activity forced a high proportion of the German fighter force to stay in Europe rather than being sent to the Eastern Front. ‘Therefore,’ he concluded, ‘those sweeps were well worth while.’1
Fighter Command was still engaged in night fighting in 1941; Max Aitken, the son of Lord Beaverbrook, developed this style of flying and fighting into a distinctive art. Thinking back on it, he recalled:
Night fighting is a fascinating game. It is rather like a game of rather noisy hide and seek or better still, it is like a game my brother and I used to play some years ago. We used to climb down into a large maze of stone quarries near our home and start stalking each other. Our ammunition was sharp stones and the loser was the first to be h
it. We used to play for hours, wriggling on our stomachs, slowly gaining a good position and then a hard throw.2
The metaphor was made clear: the game of stalking through the dark was exactly what he now faced as the operational phone rang at midnight, and the noise of sirens wailing in a distant town echoed across the landscape. On a black and muffled night, when he ascended into the cloud, there would be a chance moment when the searchlights from below would converge and starkly illuminate the silhouette of the enemy. Then it was a matter of ruthless pursuit; focusing sharply on the orange and red of the exhaust flame, then the burst of gun-power, then the sight of a deeper glow from within the enemy plane, and the darkness flooding through once more as the enemy plane went down over the sea. Such accounts, of course, deliberately ignore the fact that the stalking game worked the other way around as well. But Aitken’s courage was unquestioned; as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross and Distinguished Service Order, he received a telegram from Winston Churchill: ‘Renewed congratulations to your squadron and personally to you.’
___
Perhaps it was the burnished memory of the summer of 1940 – enhanced by a certain level of almost boyish impatience, alongside the desire for morale-boosting action – that led Churchill and his most senior commanders to yearn for a full-scale version of ‘Rhubarbs’ and ‘Circuses’ in early 1942. The idea, in which Fighter Command played its role, was that an assault should be carried out on a French port. The Soviets, deep in the blood and ice of the Eastern Front, were putting pressure on the Allies to open another front to help divert and dilute the Nazi forces. There was also a school of thought within senior military circles that with thousands of troops – English and Canadian – stationed but stationary in Britain, it was necessary to carry out an operation that would introduce battle virgins to enemy fire. And so it was decided that the port of Dieppe would be the target. The operation would involve all services.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 27