Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  They called it the Battle of Portland. Four of 601’s pilots died fighting it, among them Dick Demetriadi, who was Rhodes-Moorhouse’s brother-in-law, and W. G. Dickie, a wingman of Billy’s in Blue flight. But 601 had shot down twelve themselves. Rhodes-Moorhouse had gotten two of them. He’d been halfway back to Tangmere when he realized that his fuel switch was turned to “reserve.” As soon as he flicked it back the right way, the plane burst into life again, and he returned to the fight. Billy claimed three planes as “badly damaged”: the truth was that the Browning .303 machine guns used by the Hurricanes were so small-caliber that the German planes were often able to absorb any damage inflicted and flee the fight, heading back to their bases in France. “Terrific fight,” Billy wrote in his log. “Had to lead squadron in, Willie’s engine failed! Terrified but fun.” That night, when once he had come off duty, he drove over to the house at Chidham. He was in a great hurry to tell Rose all about it. “I’d never seen him so excited,” she said. Her mother had come to visit. The two of them sat up, enthralled, as he talked them through the fight, blow-by-blow. “His description of that day was terrific,” recalled his mother-in-law. “They found what looked like a spiral swarm of bees & Bill then went slap into them and out the other side 3 or 4 times—until the whole thing broke up and eventually disappeared under our fighters’ onslaught. Bill himself got four. Said far the most difficult was not avoiding the bullets that day, but the other planes!”

  Billy was high on excitement. Later, when the adrenaline surge had seeped away, he felt spent. All the pilots did. They slumped. Some started to shake. The stress was just too much. They drank cocoa to keep their blood sugar up, but that was all the relief they had. There was no respite. Tuesday, August 13, was the fiercest day of fighting yet. The Germans named it Adlertag—Eagle Day. They launched an all-out aerial assault on the RAF’s airfields across the south. They meant it to be the beginning of the end for the RAF. Waves of enemy aircraft came in, as many as ten an hour, over Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. The RAF would be stretched so tight across so many fronts that they would surely snap. And the Germans were right: the RAF was reaching its breaking point. At Tangmere, 145 Squadron had been withdrawn from action because it had lost ten pilots—half its strength—in just three days of fighting.

  “The thing that all of us in the RAF were aware of, ground staff and pilots, was that we were running desperately short of pilots, aircraft [(A/C)], and A/C spares,” wrote Bill Littlemore, a flight mechanic with 43 Squadron. “The problem of delay in waiting for spares and new A/C was minimized by the initiative of the maintenance crews bringing in the idea of cannibalization of just one A/C, to strip from it urgently awaited spare parts, rather than have a number of A/C unserviceable because they were all awaiting the arrival of spare parts before they could be got into the air . . . With regard to the losses of pilots which we could ill afford, and the rate at which we were losing them, [that brought] us to a position where but for the arrival of chaps like Billy Fiske and all those other wonderful guys who came from distant lands, we should have been the losers, of that there is no doubt.”

  At Tangmere, the first “scramble” call on Eagle Day came in at 6:30 a.m. “Too early,” Billy grumbled. Flying north, they saw the enemy five miles distant, toward Midhurst. Bombers. They formed into Vs, ready to attack. Billy picked out one enemy, fired on it until he saw white smoke burst from its motors. “A good burst,” four seconds long, as he closed from three hundred yards to within just one hundred. It broke off, and Billy watched as another Hurricane came down on its tail. He turned away, toward the rear of the enemy formation. He picked out another plane, toward the back of the pack. This one looked to be making a bombing run. Billy took a quick glance around. He couldn’t see a target other than the Midhurst-Pulborough railway line. The plane must have been in trouble and looking to jettison its load before turning back. He fired again. He was so close to it that he saw the starboard engine stop turning. It broke into a dive, straight down from eight thousand feet into the low cloud below. He followed it, firing all the way. Each of the Hurricane’s eight guns carried around 330 rounds, and they fired them at a rate of 1,100 per minute. Which meant, in all, Billy had only about eighteen seconds of firing time before he was out of ammunition. That was why it was so important to use short, sharp bursts. It was too easy to get carried away—which is what Billy did. By the time he had pulled out of the dive, his guns were empty. He could still see the enemy, smoke trailing from one engine. It was too damaged to climb. “At least,” Billy thought, “I won’t let him escape.” He tailed it out toward the coast, calling out on his radio for someone to come and finish it off. He followed it, in fact, right over the top of his house at Chidham, and broke off the pursuit only once he saw the puffs of brown and black smoke start to explode as they came within range of the anti-aircraft guns on the Isle of Wight.

  As soon as he got a chance, he called Rose. He was so excited, like a child who wants to show off to his mother. “Did you see me?” he asked her. He was sure she must have seen him chasing the enemy out to sea. But Rose had been tucked up in bed. And nothing, not even a dogfight over the rooftops, was going to drag her up at 7 a.m. All she wanted was for him to be happy. The reason she lived so near Tangmere, she said, was that he got “a day’s rest at home, if that home was near. The only thought of all the women, myself included, was to make our man happy. We lived for them.” But that day, worn down by stress and fatigue, “he was furious with me,” she remembered. “He had got on the tail of a plane, and herded it right across our house so I could watch him. He was all in a rage because I wouldn’t get out of bed to look.”

  “Well,” Rose said, hoping to placate him, “if I’d known it was you of course I would have gone to watch.” But it was no good. “He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t tell his Hurricane from all the others just by the sound of it.”

  Rose might not have been watching, but plenty of other people were. The fighting went on all day, and the skies above Britain were filled with webs of white vapor trails, sinuous plumes of smoke, bright sparks of metal in the sun, and occasional flashes of explosions. From the ground, it all looked so graceful, balletic even. For the pilots in the cockpits high above, it was hell. An unceasing assault on the senses. The sounds: the engine screaming three feet away, guns roaring, a constant crackle of static, shouts and cries in the earphones, and the dry rasp of their own breath in the microphone. The smells: hot rubber and metal, high-octane fuel, cordite, and, often enough, vomit. The stresses: stomachs heaving and revolting as the pilots threw their planes through the most violent maneuvers; eyes watering in the brilliant, blinding sun; necks wet with sweat chafing always against the collar, bowed down by g-forces then thrust back straight against the seat. As they dived and climbed, the sudden changes in air pressure would twist their guts and make them break wind and belch into their face masks. All the while they had to think coolly and clearly enough to survive the combat. Make a mistake up there and you’d had it.

  “Death when it came was not always clean and swift,” wrote Wilf Nicoll. “Many died trapped in the narrow confines of the cockpit while the fighter plunged thousands of feet before burying itself in the earth; conscious every second of the fall, struggling to release a trapped limb or jammed hood, coolly and clinically at first until realization came that there was no release and that time and height had slipped away: then, before the final impact with the earth, the final indignity of befouling themselves.” The lucky ones, Nicoll thought, were those who were killed outright in combat by enemy gunfire. Through the Battle of Britain, the average life expectancy, in flying time, of the RAF’s fighter pilots was down to eighty-seven hours. To put that in perspective, back when he was training, Billy had to clock ninety hours in the air before they even granted him a license to fly solo. The hard truth was that for many of them it had become a question of “when,” not “if.”

  Billy’s plane was hit for the first time later
on Eagle Day. The squadron had been in a dogfight with forty German fighters over the sea past Portland. He had hit four of them, and claimed two probable kills and two more badly damaged. A cannon shell caught his wing and did such damage that he had to turn and run back to Tangmere. Archie Hope and some of the other members of 601 stayed out, circling around pilots who had come down at sea so the search and rescue teams would know where to look for them. Once the boat had picked up the RAF pilots, Hope made a point of circling the downed German fliers, so that they, too, would be rescued and brought ashore.

  —

  The morning of Wednesday, August 14, brought relief. The weather was too rough for anyone to fly. 601 was released, and Billy had his second day off that month. He spent it at Chidmere with Rose, fast asleep. Hundreds of miles away, in the Schorfheide forest north of Berlin, Hermann Goering, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, called his top officers together for a conference at his country estate, Carinhall. Goering had decided to change tactics. They had tried to draw the RAF into committing all its aircraft into dogfights over the Channel, but it hadn’t worked. They had tried, too, to destroy the radar stations upon which the RAF depended, but the British seemed to repair them even quicker than the Germans could knock them out. Instead, they would target the airfields themselves.

  And so, on the 15th, the Germans came in greater strength than ever. They sent almost two thousand airplanes, so many that the British radar operators found it impossible to distinguish between the different formations on their screens. The front stretched from the River Tyne, right up in the northeast, around to the River Exe, down in the southwest. 601 joined up with eight squadrons in the largest wing the RAF had assembled yet. They fought out over the sea, against a formation of bombers. It was in this action that, according to 601 Squadron lore—and the official history—Billy, all his bullets gone, managed to maneuver a straggling enemy aircraft into a collision with a barrage balloon over Portsmouth and destroy it that way. It was one of seventy-two aircraft the Germans lost that day, which they came to call “Black Thursday.” But the RAF’s success came at a cost, as ever. Little Bill Clyde was hit. He managed to coax his plane back to Tangmere, though it was only the control cables that kept it hanging together. Mouse Cleaver got it too. An explosive shell hit his cockpit, and the hood exploded in his face. His eyes were punctured with shreds of Perspex. He did manage to bail out of the plane before it hit the earth, but he never fought again. That night, Billy was too tired even to write in his log. He left it all blank, thinking he would fill it in when he next had the chance.

  They came for Tangmere at noon on the 16th. The radar stations on the Isle of Wight had picked up a group of around a hundred aircraft at Cherbourg, heading toward Portsmouth. They were Junkers 87s. Stukas. Dive-bombers. The Germans used them for the scalpel work of precision bombing. They had been the scourge of Allied Europe since the start of the war, the shrill wail of their sirens (“Jericho trumpets”) a chilling herald of death and destruction. But for the RAF’s pilots, they were easy meat. “Rats in a barrel!” 601’s pilots called them. Compared with the Hurricanes and Spitfires, Stukas were slow, and poorly armed. If anything, the British pilots had almost come to admire the bravery of the men who flew them, since they were such soft targets.

  The first call came through to Tangmere from Group HQ at Uxbridge just after midday. 601 was scrambled at 12:25. When the Stukas reached the Isle of Wight, the force split into three wings. One made for Ventor, another for Portsmouth, and the last for Tangmere. The RAF fighters split too. 43 Squadron met one flight of Stukas head-on, and routed them. But 601, led that day by Archie Hope, was told to sit tight at twenty thousand feet. In all the confusion, they had one clear order, which was to hold off attacking the Stukas and to go after the fighter escort. Hope could see the Stukas clear enough, flying in diamond formation down away to his left at twelve thousand feet. They were crossing the coast at Selsey. But there were no fighters that he could see. He asked for permission to attack and was told again, “You are only to engage the Little Boys. On no account must you attack the Big Boys.” The Stukas were closing in on Tangmere now. Hope saw the first of them fall into a precipitous dive above the airfield. “To hell with it,” he told himself. He ordered his squadron into the attack. “I think the fighters were a myth,” he wrote later. “For we never saw them and neither did anyone from the other squadrons.” He was wrong. There were fighters. The combat reports from the other pilots in 601 confirm it. But then, everyone involved in the mayhem of the raid, caught in the maelstrom of bombs, bullets, and screaming planes, lived those few traumatic minutes in their own way, and afterward those who survived could only try to piece it together as best they could.

  There has always been confusion about what exactly happened on August 16, and why, but one thing’s for certain: 601 was too late. By the time they started their attack, the Stukas were already turning for home, and on the ground, all hell had broken loose. 601 chased the enemy out south to sea. The pilots, furious that they had been held back while their base, and their people, were bombed, wreaked terrible vengeance, each man chasing his own target. “The fighting was low, right over the airfield,” recalled Billy Clyde. “Almost every Hurricane scored a ‘kill’ or a ‘damaged,’” notes the official history. “The 87s were twisting and turning all over the place,” Hope wrote, “trying to fire their front guns.” There were seventeen Stukas above Tangmere. Some reports state that 601 got fifteen of them, eight shot down, seven more damaged—such a severe toll that the Germans withdrew the Stuka from the theater soon after. Certainly three came down in the countryside around Tangmere. At the same time, the airfield was erupting in flames. “It was a slaughter,” remembered W. G. Green, then a flight cadet at the base.

  Maurice Haffenden, a fitter, was there too. He wrote about it, soon after, in a letter to his family. “I went head first down a manhole as the first bomb landed on the cookhouse. For seven minutes their 1,000-pounders were scoring direct hits and everything was swept away by machine-gun bullets. I never believed such desolation and destruction to be possible. Everything is wrecked—the hangars, the stores, the hospital, the armory, the cookhouse, the canteen—well, everything.” In the horror and panic, the minds of the men and women fixed on strange, almost incidental details. “By special permission a Lyon’s ice cream fellow is allowed in the drome,” recalled Haffenden. “He always stands just outside the cookhouse on the square. He was last seen standing there guarding his tricycle, but now at the same spot is a bomb crater thirty feet deep.” One hangar had collapsed, two more were burning. The workshops, armory, and pump house were all just heaps of rubble, the central stores were a shambles, the messes were damaged, and the runway was littered with craters. Planes on the ground had exploded into twisted scrap metal. The car park had been hit, and some of the vehicles had been thrown so far by the blasts that they were entangled in the girders that supported the roof of the garage hangar. Thirteen people were dead, twenty more seriously wounded. “In the early evening,” wrote Haffenden, “they were still sorting out the bloody remnants of flesh and bones and tied them in sheets.”

  In the confusion, one voice had come through loud over the radio. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” it shouted. “Aircraft on fire! I’m injured!”

  It was Billy.

  Little Bill Clyde remembered Billy calling out to him, “I’m hit, I’ve got to land.” Clyde just replied, “OK.”

  When the Mayday call came in, Dr. Courtney Willey, the only medical officer at Station HQ that day, ordered two nursing orderlies, Corporal George Jones and Aircraftsman Second Class Cyril Faulkner, to take the ambulance out to the airfield to meet the wounded pilot when he landed. “Proceeding along the perimeter we suddenly saw a cloud of dust some 25 yards ahead of us,” Faulkner recalled. “We stopped and realized we were being bombed, the first salvo on to the parked aircraft causing the dust.” They drove on. Willey, meanwhile, was busy moving twelve patients out of the sick qu
arters into a nearby bomb shelter. He had only just done that when the sick quarters received a direct hit. The chimney breast collapsed in through the roof, and Willey was buried up to his waist in rubble. He pulled himself out and immediately went to work setting up an emergency sick bay so he could treat the wounded. While all that was going on, Jones and Faulkner were driving through the raid to the runway. And over to the east, on the far side of the field, Billy’s Hurricane appeared, low down above the trees and hedgerows. The sight of his fighter, trailing white smoke, stuck in the minds of many of the men and women at Tangmere that day—a single image that would last through the years while many others, too horrific to recall, were blacked out.

  Clyde saw it. He was in the air, but he glanced down just as Billy’s plane came in. He saw it touch down near the control tower, roll on almost to the end of the runway, and stop. “In all the activity,” he said later, “he didn’t sound like he was in bad shape.” Clyde didn’t have time to spare another thought for his friend.

  John Bushby, a cadet, was also at Tangmere that day. “The rest of the day is in my mind a series of snapshots, and the clearest snapshot in my mind is the one which registered within a few seconds of the first alarm while I was still sprinting for cover,” he wrote. “Through the gap between the two hangars I saw, across the green of the airfield grass, a lone Hurricane just touching down gently but with the undercarriage still retracted, over the panoramic blue sky. It came to rest and lay there, a thin stream of smoke settling behind it.”

  “Get out! Get out for Christ’s sake!” Bill Littlemore, the flight mechanic from 43 Squadron, had called out when he first saw that Hurricane trailing white smoke, knowing that the plane would soon burst into flames. But Billy didn’t bail out. He just flew on, toward the runway, even as the flames were licking up around his feet, burning his flesh. The Hurricane fell into a steep approach, the wheels still up. Littlemore was sure that it would explode when it hit the runway, but instead he watched as it leveled up at the last possible second and flopped down, “leaving a trail of smoke, sparks and flame in its wake,” until finally it came to a standstill, and the smoke started to billow upward. The last thing Littlemore saw before he was snapped back into the raid was “2 or 3 bods” running toward it—the nursing orderlies, Jones and Faulkner.