Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  In the air, pilots worked in teams. They flew in V formations, with two wingmen tucked on either side of the lead plane, so close that there was a constant risk they would crash. Each pilot kept one eye on the other two planes and the other eye on the surrounding skies. It was easier to believe in an old friend to do it right, someone you had flown and fought with, than it was to trust a man you’d only just met. Especially in 601. “There was a team feeling in 601 that the individuals wouldn’t have had if they had been broken up and put in separate squadrons,” wrote “Little Bill” Clyde. “They were older than most, and they’d been flying for several years.”

  Among the ground crew, and those pilots who didn’t know him from St. Moritz, there was, at first, a measure of reservation about “this untried American adventurer,” as Billy was described in the squadron’s official history. There was a lot of gossip about the fact that he had once dated Alice Faye, who was in the cinemas at that very moment, starring in a new picture about the American singer Lillian Russell. But, as the history adds, “Billy Fiske arrived at Tangmere with no pretensions, and no illusions.” He knew what it was to take on the responsibility for other men’s lives. It was what he had always done on the bob run. He knew, too, how important it was to work as a team, which is why he had insisted on Eddie, Jay, and Clifford doing all those drills with him to learn the corners back in 1932. Besides, unlike some of the other new arrivals, he was already an old friend of the senior pilots. Max Aitken, Mouse Cleaver, Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, and Little Bill Clyde all vouched for him.

  The five old friends had a lot to catch up on. Billy let the others do most of the talking. They told him about a day trip to Paris they’d made at the end of May, escorting Winston Churchill to a meeting with the French premier. Churchill had decided to stay overnight, and the pilots had been released from duty until the morning. The prospect of a free night in Paris was too good to resist, and, though they had no cash or change of clothes, Hope managed to borrow a large sum from a friend at the British embassy. “And so,” said Cleaver, “we set off for Lust and Laughter.” They were back at the airfield the next morning, in pretty poor shape. But they made quite an impression on one of Churchill’s aides, Sir Edward Spears, who wrote, “These men may have been naturally handsome, but that morning they were far more than that, creatures of an essence that was not of our world; their expressions of happy confidence as they got ready to ascend into their element, the sky, left me inspired, awed, and earthbound.” Spears must have been a romantic sort, since Cleaver’s recollections read a little differently. The assembly was, he said, “just about as hungover a crew of dirty, smelly, unshaven, unwashed fighter pilots as I doubt has ever been seen. Willie, if I remember rightly, was being sick behind his airplane when the Great Man arrived and expressed a desire to meet his escort. We must have appeared vaguely human at least, as he seemed to accept our appearance without comment.”

  After hearing his friends’ war stories, Billy was more desperate to get into the action. But he had to wait just a little longer, while he learned how to handle his new plane. 601 flew Hawker Hurricanes; all Billy’s training had been in old-fashioned Tiger Moths and, later on, more modern Harvards. 601 had been equipped with Hurricanes earlier that year, ahead of schedule, a fact that had caused some displeasure among other squadrons, which suspected, rightly, that 601’s pilots had used their political connections to pull a few strings. Max Aitken’s father, Lord Beaverbrook, had just become Britain’s first minister of aircraft production. In those early days of the summer, before the Battle of Britain, the RAF’s biggest problem wasn’t a shortage of pilots, but of planes. And while Beaverbrook had helped triple production in the space of six months between January and June, they were losing so many that the overall number available was lower on August 15 than it had been at any point that year.

  The Hurricane wasn’t the most glamorous aircraft in service. That was the Supermarine Spitfire, which was faster and more agile. But the Hurricane had the advantage of being simpler, sturdier, easier, and quicker to refuel, repair, and rearm. And, while it was a little slower than the Spitfire, it was still a sight faster than anything Billy had flown in before, half as quick again as a Harvard. The extra speed was one thing that didn’t bother him, but, that said, he made a bad start. The very first time he went up in a Hurricane, a tire burst as he touched down again at the end of the flight. “One of the boys told me it was very bad luck,” Rose said. “Which didn’t faze me at all. It never entered my head that anything would happen to Billy.” He seemed, she said, “like a knight in shining armor, fighting for a cause he believed in. And if that was true, how could any harm come to him?” He had spent his entire adult life learning the skills he needed now, from those very first runs behind the wheel of a bobsled, through his days racing the Bentley Blower around the narrow dirt roads in the south of France, to his races on the Cresta. He had honed his understanding of how to handle a vehicle under g-forces, sharpened his decision-making at speed until it had become instinctive, and had learned to do it all under the pressure of knowing that even a single mistake could cost him his life. A week’s practice was more than he needed. “Of one thing I am sure,” wrote Archie Hope. “Fiske was an outstandingly good pilot. He took to the Hurricane when he joined the squadron like a duck to water. He was a natural fighter pilot.” Another 601 pilot, Jack Riddle, remembered that Billy’s “flying reactions were extraordinary, it was as though he was part of the plane.”

  There was more to him than that, said Riddle. “He was aware and caring, sensitive to those who maybe seemed unhappy. And he was usually the fastest to the club at nearby Bosham, with its brilliant wine cellar, which we made the squadron’s HQ.” Deputy Chief of Air Staff Sholto Douglas described 601 as “flamboyant and gay and indeed reckless, as harum-scarum in some ways as the service has ever known. They were a happy band of playboys; but when the heat was on, they became in the most effortless fashion one of the most gallant and courageous of our fighter squadrons.” Billy was a natural fit.

  By July, the flying, and fighting, was all over the Channel. The pilots were up, sometimes, for five hours in the mornings alone. They were tired; “sometimes dizzy from lack of sleep, limbs aching from long hours in tiny cockpits, they took off, flew, fought and landed almost automatically,” notes Tom Moulson in the official history of 601. And yet, “among the pilots there was an indigenous optimism, a light-hearted and natural love of life, an unspoken philosophy of death.” Their high spirits were soon taxed. Hope led one formation of five planes out of Tangmere and returned alone, as the other four had been forced down. Another member, Peter Robinson, had been shot down and then strafed on the ground, and was seriously wounded. As that incident showed, the conflict was getting uglier, and the gentlemanly code of conduct 601’s pilots had lived by was becoming increasingly obsolete. On July 14, just two days after Billy’s arrival, orders were issued that fighters should now start shooting at German seaplanes even if they were marked with the Red Cross, unless they were “directly engaged in a rescue operation.” Ostensibly, those same seaplanes worked search and rescue, but the British suspected they were also performing covert reconnaissance on shipping in the Channel.

  On July 20, Billy finally made his first sortie. The squadron was up three times that day. The first two patrols were uneventful. On the third, 601’s Green and Blue flights had to fly out over the Channel to escort a convoy. One of the pilots spotted a white seaplane, ten miles off from the convoy. It was a Heinkel 59, complete with Red Cross markings. The pilots radioed back to the ground controller at Tangmere and were told to shoot it down if it was hostile. They decided, instead, to try to shepherd it back to Britain and force it to land, figuring the Germans would prefer that to the prospect of being shot down. So they swooped down on it, making several menacing passes without actually firing on it. The German pilots saw sense and turned toward Britain. But as they approached the coast, the pilot changed his mind and switched course
back out to sea. At which point one of Billy’s squadron shot it down. It was flying so low that although all four members of the crew bailed out, none of them had time to open their parachutes. It was an ugly act, and an awful sight—an induction to combat that dispelled what few romantic notions Billy had left about the war. When the RAF started to target the Red Cross planes, Hitler announced that they were “cold blooded murderers.” And the German pilots, outraged, responded by machine-gunning RAF pilots who had come down at sea. Both sides had begun to target parachutists, too, as they escaped from their burning planes.

  These were long, exhausting days. “Beneath the blazing hot summer sky time ticked inexorably away,” wrote RAF pilot Wilf Nicoll. “The atmosphere at dispersals became electric and the tension tangible . . . It only required the resonant click of the microphone switch through the ‘Tannoy’ loudspeakers or the jangling of the telephone bell to send someone hurrying behind a hut or tent or the tail of an aircraft to retch and heave helplessly until he was rendered breathless, even if only the most innocuous messages followed.” Supposedly, the pilots worked two days on and had the third off, though in these weeks they were up so often that their rest days were far more infrequent than that. Billy got two, which he spent with Rose, one in the last week of July and another the first week of August. Otherwise they were tethered to their planes, and idling, always, in one of four gears. The first was “Released,” which meant they were off duty. “Readiness” meant they were at dispersal, a short sprint away from the plane and five minutes from the air. “Standby” meant that they were strapped into their aircraft, two minutes from takeoff. It was an ordeal, being strapped into that metal box underneath a noontime sun while the engine temperature rose and its fumes streamed past the open cockpit. But it was the last gear that they hated the most: “Available.” It meant that they had to be ready to be in the air in fifteen minutes—too little time to undress, relax, or stray far away from the plane. The pilots felt caught between being on duty and off duty, and would most likely end up spending hours on duty with nothing to do to dispel the tension, uncertainty, and fear. Sometimes they would sneak off. Archie Hope once went for a bath, having checked in with Station Operations to make sure there was “nothing brewing.” He was waist-deep in water with a loofah in his hand when the “Scramble” call came through. He made it up in fourteen minutes and thirty seconds.

  For Billy, they were frustrating days too. He was scrambled three, sometimes four times a day, yet he always seemed to miss out on the action. Which infuriated him. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, who was Billy’s flight leader, joked that “you may talk of the dangers of war, but you can have small idea of what it means until you try coming back across the Channel in a tight formation with Fisky—in a rage because the Germans haven’t stayed to fight—close on your tail with his finger on the button.” On August 8, after several weeks of skirmishing, a British convoy of twenty-five ships, code-named “Peewit,” was attacked by a force of hundreds of German aircraft while sailing from Southend on the east coast of England through the Straits of Dover to Swanage on the south coast. The fighting was so intense that many of the pilots, including Billy, considered it the start of the Battle of Britain. “Blitz starts,” he noted in his logbook. Billy was scrambled four times. And he didn’t get to fire a single bullet. He filled his log with little notes recording that he had been “too early for the fun,” then “too late,” then “too early,” then “too late” again. The biggest fight of the battle yet had taken place off the Isle of Wight, just a few miles away. Billy had spent five and a half hours in the air and had seen only one “bandit” all day. He always seemed to be in the right place at the wrong time. His third patrol had ended ten minutes before the first German attack, and his final one started just as the last was finishing. And while 601 was shuttling back and forth and scouring the skies, 43 Squadron, the “Fighting Cocks,” who were also based at Tangmere, had been fighting for their lives and had lost two pilots. Billy had been itching to “do something,” as he wrote in his diary, for so long that the urge was getting to be unbearable. He wouldn’t have to wait much longer.

  That Sunday, August 11, was the finest morning anyone had seen all week. It had been bad for the last two days, all thick cloud and heavy rain, but that morning the sun rose into a clear blue sky. Billy and the others had already eaten breakfast and were stretching out in their deck chairs, warming their bones in the first rays of the morning sun, when the call came through. The radar stations over toward Dover had detected a swarm of enemy aircraft assembling over Cherbourg.

  “SCRAMBLE!”

  They had two minutes, from start to finish—an age for a man accustomed to covering the Cresta Run in under sixty seconds. The pilots grabbed their kit, helmets, gauntlets, “Mae West” life jackets, and sprinted across the grass to their aircraft. Their parachutes were waiting for them, on the wing. The ground crew helped the pilots shove the packs on, then boosted them up onto the wing. Billy trod warily, careful not to slip, then flicked his legs up and over and plopped himself down in the cockpit. Even for a man of his build, there wasn’t much room to move. He was surrounded by instruments, gears, cogs, pedals, and levers, each with its own purpose.

  First, before he could fire her up, he had to run through his final checks, just as he had once done with his Bentley back on La Croisette. Check the pneumatic pressure for the brakes, slip the trim in neutral and the rudder over hard right to counter the torque on takeoff, tighten the throttle nut. Then flick the magnetos, and start the engine. The exhausts fired shotgun blasts of blue gas back past the fuselage, which were immediately whipped into the air as the propeller began to spin. Billy had to crank the seat up as high as it would go so he could peer around the long nose of the aircraft as he taxied over to his takeoff position; even then he had to swing the plane this way and that to get a clear view of the ground in front of him. At the end of the runway he held the plane on the brakes as he advanced the throttle. As the note of the engine rose higher and higher, the plane began to buck and shudder. He let the brakes slip, and it shot forward across the grass. Lurching, bounding, bobbing, till the tail rose into the air; lift, bounce, lift again, and then the up-and-away into the sky.

  The first reports from the observation posts were in now. It wasn’t a wing the Germans were sending, but an armada. The single largest force that had come across the Channel in one body yet, almost two hundred aircraft, half of them heavy bombers, the rest fighters. All bound for Portland Naval Base, one hundred miles down the coast. The squadron had twelve planes up, all now assembled and in formation above St. Catherine’s Point, and they got their orders from Control. They were given a vector and an altitude, and told to fly on toward Portland. It was fifteen minutes’ flying time, even at top speed.

  They were over Swanage, about halfway there, when they saw them. “A very large number of enemy aircraft,” wrote Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, “milling around some miles to the south.” They were about twenty miles off. Rhodes-Moorhouse led the squadron in a turn toward the enemy. And at that exact point, his engine cut out. He turned back to Tangmere and told the squadron to carry on. Billy took charge. He called, “Line astern” over the radio, ordering the ten remaining planes to follow his lead as he flew, full throttle, toward the enemy. They were utterly outnumbered. But the odds didn’t figure. They flew, without hesitation, into a formation so vast they hardly knew where to start. “They seemed to be in countless tiers upward ad infinitum,” remembered Mouse Cleaver. “They were so thick we almost had a permanent target.” Billy didn’t stop to look back. He took it on trust that the squadron was following him in. And then “we came into direct contact with the enemy aircraft—and broke up for individual attack.”

  The South African RAF ace Adolph “Sailor” Malan had said that there were ten rules for dogfighting. The pilots knew them inside out because they were posted up on the noticeboards in the mess halls around the country. Billy and 601 had broken two of them befo
re they’d even opened fire. Air discipline and team work are words that mean something in air fighting; when diving to attack, always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as a top guard. But now it was each man for himself. Billy focused, as he flew in, on the first rule: Wait until you see the whites of their eyes. He was three hundred yards out when he first fired. A touch too far, but he thought he saw the bullets hit home. And in that moment, he broke a third rule: While shooting think of nothing else. A second aircraft passed across his sights, so he switched his aim. In the confusion, he nearly collided with the second plane. He swerved. And then he was through and out the other side of the swarm. Never fly straight and level for more than thirty seconds in the combat area. He carried on out of range, climbing all the time. Height gives you the initiative. He circled around and, looking down, saw another target. He fired again and saw smoke explode from its starboard motor. It dropped down out of sight. He picked out another, this one flying straight on, a way below him. “I dived straight at him and gave a good burst, narrowly missing him as he passed underneath. He went into a steep dive from about 16,000 feet.” He watched it all the way down ten thousand feet, and in doing so broke another rule: Always keep a sharp lookout. There was a Messerschmitt on his tail. Always turn and face the attack. Instead, Billy whistled down into a steep, spiraling dive. Make your decisions promptly. It is better to act quickly, even though your tactics are not of the best. If he held the dive too long, the engine would cut out under the negative g-force. He dropped, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet. It was enough. He had lost the Messerschmitt. And by the time he climbed again, the skies were clear. The enemy had gone. Just like that. He cut out for Tangmere.