Читать книгу Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945 - Patrick Bishop - Страница 14

The war began in a flurry of false alarms. Air-raid sirens sounded almost immediately after Chamberlain’s Sunday broadcast, sending civilians hurrying to the shelters. But no Germans came. The defenders were eager for action and trigger-happy. Three days after the declaration of war, a searchlight battery on Mersea Island in the Blackwater estuary spotted what was thought to be a hostile aircraft crossing the Channel coast. This exciting news was passed on to the Northolt headquarters of 11 Group, which covered the south-east of England. They, in turn, ordered the local sector controllers at North Weald to send up fighters to investigate. Hurricanes from 56 Squadron took off from North Weald aerodrome and climbed through the mist into the clear morning sky to hunt for the intruders. As they did so, their traces were picked up by the radar station at Canewdon, on the muddy tongue of Essex that sticks out between the Crouch and Thames estuaries. Even now, the cause of the tragic fiasco that followed is not entirely clear. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the Fighter Command chief, said later that the equipment was faulty and the baffle designed to block out electronic echoes from the landward side was not functioning, though this was disputed. To the operators it seemed they had located a big enemy formation coming in over the sea. More fighters were scrambled to deal with the apparent threat, and they in turn registered on the screen and added to the thickening confusion. Among them were twelve Spitfires from 74 Squadron at Hornchurch. ‘A’ Flight, commanded by Adolph Malan, took off first. He led one section of three aircraft. Flying Officer ‘Paddy’ Byrne, an experienced, Irish-born pilot with a reputation for eccentricity, led another. In the adrenaline-charged atmosphere, chaos, then catastrophe, ensued.

Pilot Officer John Freeborn, barely out of Leeds Grammar School but well-freighted with Yorkshire obstinacy, was directly behind Byrne. ‘It was a very misty morning but it was a beautiful day,’ he said. ‘I remember looking down and seeing we had cut a line through the haze where we had taken off. Malan was well in front…We saw these aircraft and Malan gave the order: “Number One attack – go!” They made an attack at these aircraft and then pulled away. And so we went and attacked.’¹

The combat was only too successful. Freeborn, Byrne and the third man in the section, Sergeant Pilot John Flinders, swooped down in line astern. Freeborn and Byrne opened fire and saw two aircraft go down trailing smoke. Freeborn felt ‘exhilarated’ at their success. On the way back to Hornchurch he saw what he thought was a Luftwaffe bomber and was about to attack when Flinders yelled a warning on the R/T that it was in fact a friendly Blenheim. On landing he was met by his commanding officer, Squadron Leader George Sampson, and told that the aircraft he and Byrne had disposed of were Hurricanes from 56 Squadron. Pilot Officer Montague Hulton-Harrop was dead. He was nineteen years old, a newcomer to the squadron and ‘tall, fair-haired and eager’, according to Eric Clayton, a ground-crew member who maintained his machine. Pilot Officer Tommy Rose survived and showed up later in the day.²

Freeborn was appalled. He tried to find Malan, but he had ‘done a bunk completely. Never saw him.’ He and Byrne were put under arrest. ‘I was sent to my room with a bloke from 54 Squadron to guard me…I was eighteen years old, frightened to bloody death.’³ Coming soon after an incident when he had been severely reprimanded for landing with the undercarriage of his Spitfire up, Freeborn assumed his RAF career was over. The affair was particularly agonizing because, as squadron adjutant, he had previously distributed orders to the pilots telling them under no circumstances to shoot at single-engined planes. The instruction was based on the calculation that no Luftwaffe fighter had the range to reach Britain and that any single-engined machine was bound to be friendly. The speed with which Freeborn forgot the order was proof of the disorienting power of the heat of the moment. Al Deere, who was also scrambled that morning, had felt it too. ‘We were all keyed up,’ he said. ‘You didn’t think about the fact that a 109 could never have got as far as England from the then borders of Germany.’⁴

A general court martial was set for 7 October. Sampson, ‘an absolute toff’ according to Freeborn, put the pair in touch with Sir Patrick Hastings, an intelligence officer at Fighter Command HQ at Stanmore, who had been a leading QC in peacetime. Hastings agreed to act as prisoners’ friend and told them to speak to Roger Bushell, another well-known figure at the London bar who was now commanding 600 (City of London) Auxiliary Squadron at Biggin Hill. Bushell, whose charm and indomitable nature made him one of the best-liked men in the air force, agreed to act as junior to Hastings. The proceedings were held at Stan-more and have never been made public. Freeborn claims Malan denied ever giving the order to attack. The defence argued that the case should never have been brought. After about an hour the four-man tribunal, led by the Judge Advocate, acquitted the two. It was the start of a long-running enmity in 74 Squadron. ‘From then on,’ Freeborn said, ‘Malan and I never got on.’

‘Sailor’ Malan had already established himself as a formidable personality. He was short, with fair hair, blazing blue eyes and a square, impassive face and cleft chin. He was coming up to twenty-nine, considerably older than most of the other pilots. He had done much in a hard life, and spoken little. Adolph Gysbert Malan was born within sight of Table Mountain in Cape Province and brought up on a farm near the small town of Slent. As a child he roamed the veldt with a shotgun, developing a marksman’s eye that would serve him well in the war. Aged fourteen he was sent off to a maritime college on board the training ship General Botha. The regime was spartan, the bullying institutionalized and the discipline harsh, bordering on the sadistic. Smoking was punished by six strokes of the lash. The victim was first certified as medically fit enough to withstand the punishment. He was ordered to strip to ‘No. 1 Duck Trousers’ – shorts – and given a rubber disc to bite on. Then he was stretched over a table in the recreation room and roped down to a ring bolt while the punishment was administered in public.

Malan once said: ‘The first time I saw this punishment handed out it was to a big chap – an Old Salt (as the senior cadets were known). It was quite a shock to see him break down. Later on I understood why.’ Freeborn had seen the scars from the whippings on Malan’s back. His biographer wrote that ‘in talks with Sailor, during which he described incidents infinitely more dramatic and perilous than anything that happened aboard the Botha, I never saw him more emotionally stirred than when he recalled the ceremony of being tied down and thrashed. The memory of it stayed with him vividly as a deed of outrage, an invasion of pride and privacy that helped to fashion a kind of stoicism that became an armour plating for the strenuous days to come.’ The experience also made him reluctant, ‘in later years, to join in the horseplay of RAF squadron initiating customs’.⁵

The 6 September débâcle was inscribed in RAF folklore as the Battle of Barking Creek, a reference to a nearby landmark which was a joke location beloved of music-hall comedians. It was one of several similar incidents, all efficiently hushed up (an official communique was not issued until seven months later), which revealed to the air force and the government the dangerous inadequacies of the country’s air defences. On the same day as the ‘Barking Creek’ episode, Brian Kingcome was with 65 Squadron patrolling at 5,000 feet over the Thames. Every time they passed over the Isle of Sheppey, anti-aircraft guns opened up, even though the undersides of their Spitfires were painted black and white to identify them as friendly. A signal was sent to the batteries telling them to hold their fire, but it did not stop one aeroplane being hit in the wing and fuselage.

The basic problem was one of identification. The aircraft that sparked the panic on 6 September was, according to Dowding, carrying refugees from Holland. Other accounts say it was a Blenheim returning from a patrol over the North Sea, or an Anson from Coastal Command. Unless air traffic could be quickly and accurately recognized as friend or enemy, the potential for disaster was enormous. The problem had already been solved by a system called IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), a transmitter which sent back an amplified signal that established an aircraft’s innocent intentions when picked up in a radar beam. But none of the Spitfires or Hurricanes chasing each other around the Thames estuary had yet been fitted with it. After the incident the installation programme was belatedly speeded up, so that by June 1940 it was standard equipment on every fighter.

The fiasco concentrated minds. Al Deere, who was with 54 Squadron at Hornchurch, noted that ‘on five out of my next six training flights I was engaged on tactical exercises in cooperation with the control and reporting organization’. In retrospect he felt that some good had come out of ‘this truly amazing shambles’. It was, he thought, ‘just what was needed to iron out some of the many snags which existed…and to convince those who were responsible that a great deal of training of controllers, plotters and radar operators, all of whom had been hastily drafted in on the first emergency call-up, was still required before the system could be considered in any way reliable’.⁶

The mechanisms for identifying and reporting the approach of enemy aircraft, and the command and control structure to counter their attacks, would be refined and tested in the relative quiet of the winter and spring. Radar was at the heart of the system. It was based on the discovery that solid objects reflected radio waves. A projected radio signal, on encountering the metal skin of an aircraft, bounced back and registered as a blip on a cathode-ray tube. The military potential was obvious and the United States, Japan and, above all, Germany worked on applications throughout the 1930s.

Britain got radar late but it had recovered lost time and by the onset of the war was protected by two chains of transmitters covering the upper and lower airspace of the island’s eastern and southern approaches. The twenty stations, with their mysterious 350-feet-high transmitters and 240-feet receivers, could locate aircraft a hundred miles away and give an approximate idea of direction, height and numbers. With radar, the historical defensive advantage given to Britain by the sea extended to the air. It was particularly effective over large expanses of water where there was no confusing ‘clutter’. Even so it was to remain, for several years, an inexact science.

The electronic information pulsing on the cathode-ray tubes under the intense gaze of the Waafs, who were the most expert operators, was supplemented by the eyes and ears of the spotters of the Observer Corps. These were volunteers who squatted in sandbagged posts, equipped with binoculars, aircraft identification pamphlets and a crude altitude measuring instrument, trying to track enemy aeroplanes as they droned overhead. The blurred picture provided by the two was brought into sharper focus after passing through the filter room at Bentley Priory, an eighteenth-century Gothic mansion in Stanmore on the north-west edge of London, where Dowding and Fighter Command had their headquarters. There the reports were interpreted in the light of other data, and the distances of incoming aircraft reported by neighbouring radar stations subjected to a calculation known as ‘range cutting’ to provide a more accurate idea of their course.

The graded information was now transferred on to a map with red counters representing enemy aeroplanes and black counters friendly ones. The information was passed on to the operations rooms at each level of the chain of command – sector, group and Fighter Command HQ – where it was translated on to identical map tables. The development of a raid was watched by the controller and his staff from a balcony. The resources at hand to deal with the intruders were indicated on a large board rigged with coloured bulbs, which showed which squadrons would be available in thirty minutes, which were at five minutes’ readiness, which were at two minutes’ readiness and which were already in the air.

Fighter Command had a simple pyramid command structure, with Dowding, in Bentley Priory, at the top. One step down were the group commanders, each presiding over one of the four quadrants into which Britain’s air defence had been divided. The south-west, and half of Wales, were covered by 10 Group, the middle segment of England and Wales by 12 Group, and Scotland and the far North by 13 Group. No. 11 Group, with responsibility for London and the south-east corner of England, was the busiest. Each group was subdivided into sectors that centred on a main fighter base, supplemented by a number of satellite aerodromes.

Raids fell naturally into one or another group’s area of activity. When enemy aircraft were reported, the duty controller in the group operations room, in consultation with the group commander, decided which sector would deal with it and which aircraft would be ‘scrambled’. Control of the fighters then passed to the sector controller, whose task was to manoeuvre his aircraft into the best position to intercept the raiders. He was helped in this by the IFF reports, which allowed him to keep track of his assets. The signal – ‘Tally Ho!’ – from the squadron or flight commander, meant that the enemy had been sighted and battle was about to be joined. At this point control of events passed to the pilots.

Orders and information were passed down the command chain and from pilot to pilot in a code that was very soon to enter public parlance and the popular imagination. The enemy were ‘bandits’ (the Germans called them Indianer – ‘indians’). ‘Angels’ indicated altitude, so that ‘Angels fifteen’ meant 15,000 feet. ‘Pancake’ was an order to come back and land. ‘Vector’, plus a number indicating geometric degrees, gave the course a pilot was to steer. ‘Buster’ meant flat out. The trusty clock system – ‘bandits at ten o’clock’ – devised on the Western Front, provided an accurate fix on where the trouble was located.

The prevailing jumpiness of the first weeks of the war was partly because few of those involved in air defence had any clear idea of what to expect. The experience of Poland had suggested a blitzkrieg, sudden and pitiless, in which virtually everything was vulnerable. In fact the first German target was logical and conventional: the British Home Fleet, tucked away in the estuaries and anchorages of Scotland, from where it could menace Germany and its navy in relative security. On the morning of 16 October, twelve Junkers 88 fast bombers set off from Westerland on the Island of Sylt just off the Danish coast to attack shipping at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth on the north side of the Firth of Forth. The first group arrived at 2.30 in the afternoon, taking anti-aircraft gunners south of the Forth Bridge – just east of the base – by surprise. The main target was the battleship HMS Hood, but to the disappointment of the raiders it was in dry dock. Hitler, apparently anxious to avoid civilian casualties while there was still a chance of a settlement with Britain, had ordered that only ships on the water could be attacked.

Two targets presented themselves: the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Edinburgh, riding at anchor on the eastern side of the bridge. The Junkers were each carrying two 500-kg bombs. At 2,500 feet, several of them dived on the vessels and released their loads. Both ships were hit, but the bombs failed to do significant damage. Ten men were injured, none fatally.

The anti-aircraft batteries now opened up, joined by fire from the cruisers, which had previously been ordered to engage aircraft only if they proved hostile, presumably a precaution taken to counter the reckless gunnery of the first weeks. The action took place on the doorsteps of two RAF stations. Turnhouse, the home of 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, just to the south of the Forth Bridge, and Drem, where 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron was based. The raid was already several minutes old before Spitfires were in the air. As the bombers headed for home, they were chased out to sea. One was caught by three fighters from 603 Squadron, who opened fire, killing the rear gunner and shutting down the port engine. They were joined by another section from the squadron, who added to the fusillade battering the Junkers. ‘He was responding with all his armaments; tracers were shooting past me, and I got a glimpse of a gunner behind twin guns,’ one of the pilots, Patsy Gifford, said after the action. ‘We went in again and gave him some more and I saw he was hit forward. Bits of fabric were dropping off and I thought I saw a red glow inside the fuselage.’⁷ The Junkers hit the sea with bullets from the Spitfires stitching the water. The surviving three from the four-man crew were picked up by a trawler.

Another Ju 88 was shot down by 602 Squadron, also crashing into the sea. In both cases several pilots had been involved in their destruction. The official account recorded that this had been a team effort, but it singled out Gifford and two 602 pilots, George Pinkerton and Archie McKellar, for special mention. They were identified not by name but by pre-war profession. The squadrons involved were auxiliaries. Gifford, like several others in 603 Squadron, was a solicitor; he spent his weekends driving a Frazer-Nash car very fast, shooting, fencing, taking out girls and flying. Pinkerton was thirty years old, and had left his wife, six-month-old daughter and fruit farm in Renfrewshire behind after the squadron was called up. McKellar was twenty-seven, short, aggressive and fit, and worked in his father’s plastering business before joining the squadron full time. Gifford was to be killed the following spring, McKellar in the autumn.

The image they presented of social cohesion, of ordinary men from different walks of life coming together in the defence of their country, was naturally appealing to official propagandists. The fact that it was the amateurs of the auxiliary air force who had drawn first blood was given the maximum emphasis. ‘Saturday Afternoon Airmen Shoot Nazi Bombers Down’, was the headline in the Daily Express.

In other respects the Rosyth raid gave little reason for satisfaction. The fighters had not been able to prevent one of the raiders dropping an opportunistic bomb on a destroyer, HMS Mohawk, entering the Firth of Forth as the Luftwaffe was leaving, killing sixteen members of the crew, including the captain. Once again, the warning system had failed. Intelligence reports had predicted an attack, but from ten o’clock on the morning of the raid the local radar station was ineffective, due either to a power failure or a faulty valve. No sirens were sounded to alert the civilian population (though they were activated at military bases). Despite the rejoicing at the downing of two German bombers, the first raiders to be shot down, the Luftwaffe got off very lightly, given the superior speed and firepower of the attackers. That ten escaped was partly owing to the fact that the Spitfire pilots were under orders to go no closer than 400 yards, which was thought to be the most effective range for the Brownings. The pilots immediately recognized that getting in closer would produce more devastating results.

The bomber crews also benefited from a certain caution on the part of the defenders. When Hector MacLean, who had been training to be a solicitor in a Glasgow legal office before moving to Drem with 602 Squadron, was scrambled he ‘couldn’t believe it wasn’t another mess-up because we’d been ordered off so often to intercept things and it had been a Blenheim or an Anson or something like that’. Spotting a bomber, he ‘followed it gingerly thinking…I must not shoot one of our own fellas down, but there were the crosses so finally I had a go.’ Having emptied his ammunition, he hurried back to rearm in preparation for a second wave that never came. Until the squadron moved south in August the following year, the only Germans he saw were ‘mainly single aircraft sneaking over to take pictures and drop the odd bomb and attack convoys off the coast. It was easy to do. They could nip in, drop a few bombs around the boats and get out before we could get at them.’⁸

The same pattern of frustration and boredom settled over all the fighter squadrons in England and Scotland. Pilots spent their days at readiness, being ordered airborne to check out incursions by unidentified aircraft, ‘X’ raids as they were known, that almost always turned out to be friendly or else were too far off to intercept. Then there were the dreary convoy patrols, flying in circles over ships that were rarely attacked. There were occasional brushes with the enemy. On 20 November, 74 Squadron at Hornchurch recorded its first success when three pilots fastened on to a Heinkel 111 heavy bomber and shot it down over the Thames estuary. The following day two Hurricanes from 79 Squadron at Biggin Hill were patrolling over the south coast when they were ordered to investigate a radar sighting that turned out to be a Dornier 17 medium bomber on a weather reconnaissance. They found it, descended on it, opened fire and watched it explode as it hit the Channel.

On 3 February Peter Townsend took part in the destruction of the first German bomber to be shot down on British soil since the First World War, after 43 Squadron had exchanged bucolic Tangmere for the bleak surroundings of Acklington, high up on the north-east coast near Newcastle. He was leading his section on patrol over the sea, keeping at wave level to surprise any German aircraft, which tended to hug the clouds, when he saw a Heinkel. The crew saw nothing ‘until the bullets began tearing into their bomber. Only then did red tracer come spurting from their rear guns, but, in the first foolish rapture of combat, I believed myself…invulnerable.’ The Heinkel staggered over the cliffs at Whitby and crash-landed in snow behind the town. Townsend felt elated at the success – then, on hearing there were two survivors, a touch of remorse. He visited them in hospital. Then he returned to the mess to drink champagne. It was, he thought later, ‘a horribly uncivilized way of behaving, really, when you have just killed someone. But an enemy bomber down was proof of our prowess, and that was a legitimate pretext for celebration. For the enemy crew, whom we had shot to pieces, we gave no thought. Young, like us, they had existed, but existed no longer. Deep down we knew, but dared not admit, that we had little hope of existing much longer ourselves. So, meanwhile, we made merry.’⁹

Death was more likely to come through accident than enemy action that winter. The need to have fighters on permanent standby around the clock meant that pilots were called on to do an increased amount of night flying, a skill to which insufficient attention had been paid before the war. George Bennions, now with 41 Squadron at Catterick, found it was ‘automatically assumed that they would just send you off at night and there would be no problem’. The Spitfires they were flying were notoriously difficult to operate in a darkness which had deepened considerably with the introduction of the blackout. ‘The long nose blotted everything out straight in front of you, and because the engine had very short stubs, all that you saw…was a great moustache of flame…The only thing you could do was to tuck your head back into the cockpit and take off on the instruments, which was all right for a trained pilot, but for new pilots who hadn’t done any night flying, or very little, it must have been terrible.’

A Canadian pilot, Pilot Officer Overall, took off one night, circled round and flew straight into a house. Bennions protested at the stupidity of sending off pilots in pitch darkness without allowing them to first get familiarized in conditions of bright moonlight. A senior officer accused him of being afraid. His suggestion, though, was eventually adopted.¹⁰

Even the most skilful pilots found themselves in difficulties, especially when sensory deprivation was combined with incompetence on the part of those directing them on the ground. Al Deere nearly got killed while being guided back after a night patrol in total darkness by the Hornchurch controller, who vectored him straight into a clump of barrage balloons. It was no wonder that so many pilots hated and feared night flying.

The winter of 1939 is frozen in the memory of those who lived through it as the bitterest they ever endured. On many mornings, snow had to be shovelled off the aprons and runways and the Merlin engines of the fighters thawed out and run up before any flying could take place. The aircraft were often covered in a crust of ice and had to be scrubbed down with wire-bristle brooms. At Drem, the ‘coldest spot on earth’, the pilots sat in poorly insulated dispersal huts, clustered around a lukewarm stove, playing ‘uckers’ – a form of ludo – and waiting for the phone to ring. Very soon everyone could distinguish the tone of the ‘ops’ phone, announcing a scramble, from that of the ‘admin’ line. The bad weather would continue to make flying and life in general difficult well into the spring.

Conditions in the cosy brick messes and living quarters of the fighter station headquarters were bearable enough, but existence at the satellite stations could be miserable. The members of 32 Squadron, pilots and ground crew, had to move to Gravesend while Biggin Hill was temporarily closed so deep shelters could be dug and a concrete runway laid – part of a nationwide programme to replace the now embarrassingly anachronistic grass fields with all-weather surfaces. The squadron diarist recorded that ‘the wretched troops lived in the utmost discomfort, sleeping on palliases on the floor and being fed from a cooking trailer…the NCOs also slept on the floor, and the less lucky of the officers.’

Great ingenuity was used in the pursuit of fun. When the well-connected sportsmen of 601 Auxiliary Squadron found themselves based briefly at Hornchurch around Christmas, the commanding officer, Max Aitken, son of the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, used his show-business contacts to arrange for the cast of the Windmill Theatre to visit. The men loved the demure striptease for which the Windmill girls were famous. Several members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the ‘Waafs’, who were now being posted to RAF stations around the country, walked out in protest, however.

For most pilots, though, life was spartan and uncertain, especially for the newcomers and those finishing their training. In letters home they recounted their daily routines, successes and setbacks in a tone of jaunty confidence that seemed designed to calm the fears of anxious mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Occasionally, though, a note of doubt or worry breaks through the surface of imperturbability, a reminder that behind the bravado were innocent young men, barely out of adolescence, green, apprehensive and homesick. Paddy Finucane, then at No. 8 Flying Training School at RAF Montrose, still sounds like a schoolboy in a letter to his younger brother, Kevin. ‘How did you like Robin Hood! I saw it in London when I was at Uxbridge. It was on at the local fleapit and I enjoyed it immensely. The part I liked was when old Guy of Gisborne got a good twelve inches of cold steel in the bread basket. The fighting and shooting scenes were very good…’¹¹

Noel Benson sent long, regular letters to his mother and doctor father at their house at Great Ouseburn, near York, throughout the winter of 1939 and 1940, detailing his progress. He had gone to Cranwell as a flight cadet in April 1938 after leaving Sedbergh public school. At the end of November 1939 he was with 145 Squadron at Redhill and Croydon and writing home to complain that the letters ‘daddy’ sends are not long enough. His main concern is the stinginess of the authorities in allocating petrol coupons, which may prevent him from getting home for leave. He seems to have spent much of his spare time quietly, visiting family and friends in the area for lunch and supper, dutifully negotiating the blackout to give lifts home to other guests. The news from the squadron was mostly domestic. A brother pilot was getting married and he would like to give him a dog as a present. A bitch in the Benson household had recently littered. Could they send photos of the pups so he can pick one out? Occasionally he vented his frustration at the inaction of the phoney war. One of his acquaintances was ‘one of the lucky ones’, who had been posted to one of the four fighter squadrons sent to France. On 11 December he was ‘pretty fed up because there is absolutely nothing doing here. But the big bugs do such damn stupid things at times that it is enough to make anyone wild and fed up. If I try and say any more I shall probably choke with rage!!!’

Eleven days later he had been posted to 603 Squadron, now at Prestwick near Glasgow, and was ‘busy from the word go. I started flying immediately which suited me fine.’ At the end of the month he reported that he was ‘having a very busy time here but like it very much. I am “on” from dawn to dusk, so you see I have not much free time. I am afraid there is no hope whatsoever of any leave for the next month or so.’

On the first day of the New Year, Benson was trained up and took his place as a fully operational member of the squadron. He found his comrades ‘a very decent crowd’, and liked the fact that, despite an influx of outsiders, the unit was still mostly composed of the pre-war amateurs. ‘Being an auxiliary squadron they [all] had jobs before the war and this was really their hobby. So there is a lot of red tape brushed aside. The regulars in the squadron are quite often horrified at the irregular things that they do but I must say they get the job done.’

The squadron routine meant that time off was scarce. After three weeks’ continual duty, he went with a friend to Glasgow, where they could ‘hardly see a thing because just outside the city we ran into the smoke fog that hangs over the place, and although it was mid afternoon it looked like dusk. Everyone seemed to have long faces and I don’t blame them if they are always in that muck.’ There is no mention of girlfriends or even women. The boyish note, the thank-yous to uncle Reg for a cardigan and unknown donors for mittens to combat the hellish cold, gradually fades, edged out by a mounting confidence. For his birthday, he announced, he would like a car badge, ‘in the form of a Spitfire. It must be a Spitfire, no other type will do.’ On 8 February he reported ‘we chased away another Hitlerite today, two in fact, but they nipped into the clouds before we got a smack at them’. Early in March he once again expressed his frustration, this time because the auxiliaries of 602 Squadron were seeing more action than his own unit. ‘There is a good deal of friendly rivalry between us,’ he wrote. ‘We are rather annoyed because we have not seen any fun lately while this other squadron has been having all the fun.’¹² This fretting at not being in the thick of things earned him the nickname ‘Broody’, the commanding officer of 603 told Benson’s father later, in a letter, ‘because he was always so despondent if, for any reason, he was not allowed to fly’. He also ‘had a habit of pondering over the many problems confronting him’.¹³

Noel Benson sounds from his letters to have been what was known as a ‘keen type’. To be identified as such won a pilot official approval, but it invited mild, affectionate scorn from comrades who considered conspicuous effort to be slightly embarrassing. The truth was that almost everyone was keen. They were just reluctant to appear so.

Denis Wissler seems to have conformed more to the social norm. He was intelligent and warm-hearted to the point of vulnerability. His father was of Swiss origin, and came from the family that invented Marmite, whose London headquarters he ran. Denis joined the RAF on a short-service commission in July 1939 after leaving Bedford School, alma mater of a number of Fighter Command pilots. In January 1940, aged nineteen, he was in the middle of advanced training at 15 Flying Training School Lossiemouth, in the far north of Scotland. Wissler kept a journal, each evening recording the day’s events, no matter how tired he was or how much beer had been taken, in a small red leather Lett’s diary. It is a lively account: of days flying and fighting and evenings drinking, of flirtation burgeoning into romance. Sounding through it all is one dominant and recurring theme: his desire to succeed as a pilot and be worthy of the Fighter Boy camaraderie that he, like so many, felt with the force of love.

He began the course on 1 January, flying in the morning and ‘feeling perfectly fit and quite at home in the air’. On 3 January he spent the day working on perfecting his rolls – the manoeuvre of rotating while flying straight and level. ‘I did two and they were grand,’ he recorded with satisfaction. ‘I even gained height in the second.’ Two days later he felt he ‘had them taped now. My two best efforts were a roll at 1,000 feet then three rolls in succession’. The following week he had a flying test in which he was put through ‘(1) a spin (2) a slow roll (3) a loop (3) [sic] steep turns both ways to left and right (4) a forced landing (5) low flying (6) slow low flying (7) and naturally a take-off and landing. The instructor said that it was quite good, but that my steep turns were split-arse (ragged and wild).’ After a few days without flying, partly it seems because of restrictions imposed by the instructors, he was in the air again, but noted disconsolately that he ‘flew very badly today, heavens knows why because I really felt on top of the world and was looking forward to flying again, but somehow it didn’t just connect’. Despite the off days, Wissler was a good pilot. At one point he writes that he was asked if he would like to go on an armament course, which would mean rapid promotion and the chance of a permanent commission, but as it entailed a long course of lectures and exams and little or no flying, ‘I said NO.’

The prospect of dying pointlessly, crashing into a hillside or misjudging a landing, was always present. On his second day he came back late from a session on a Harvard, an aircraft notoriously difficult to retrieve from a spin, to find that his fellow pupils had heard rumours of a crash and assumed ‘I was a fried piece of meat…everyone was saying “poor old Wissler”’. A week later a pupil and instructor were killed after their aeroplane ‘hit something, what, we don’t know yet but it brought the plane down’.

Lossiemouth was an isolated spot, stranded on the chilly extremities of the Morayshire coast, but there were cinemas and pubs a few miles away in Elgin. Given the town’s isolation, there seems to have been a variety of films to see. On 19 January Wissler and his friend ‘Wootty’ – Ernest Wootten, another short-service entrant – saw The Ghost Goes West, which he judged a ‘grand film and really comes up to what everyone says about it’. In the next nine days he took in Wuthering Heights, Jesse James, The Four Feathers and The Lion Has Wings, a stirring story featuring Bomber and Fighter Command based on the raid on German warships in North Sea harbours at the beginning of the war, directed by Alexander Korda and starring Ralph Richardson. Sequences of it had been shot at Hornchurch using ‘B’ Flight of 74 Squadron the day after Barking Creek. The hard work in the air was supplemented by hearty drinking. On 2 February he wrote, ‘we did no flying today as the weather wasn’t good enough…In fact I did nothing until the evening when Wootty and I went out to the “Beach Bar” and met Sergeant Harman, one of the instructors in my flight, and I really got more drunk than ever before, so badly that I couldn’t even stand.’

Despite the overall cheeriness that emanates from the faded ink, sometimes his mood faltered and dejection crept in. On 8 February he went down with German measles (‘most unpatriotic’), came up in spots and was confined to bed. Four days later he was allowed out. ‘I got up and walked down to flights. Wootty wasn’t doing anything so he and I walked into Lossiemouth where I posted a letter home and bought a magazine to help while away the time this evening. Our dinner was quite uneatable tonight. Oh God what a hole this is and how glad I shall be to go.’

He was, it is clear, painfully homesick. The laborious procedures and long delays involved in making a trunk call, made worst by wartime restrictions, never deterred him from ringing home. After a night drinking strong ale mixed with draught bitter he none the less remembered his parents were waiting to hear from him and, after a lengthy wait for a line, ‘carried on a small conversation. I could never have forgiven myself if I had missed one word Mummy or Pop had said.’

On Friday, 16 February, he and the rest of his class were given a leaving dinner in the mess and got appropriately drunk. The following day he learned he was going to St Athans in Wales to finish his training. He wrote the news in his diary on the train home to ten days’ leave in wobbly writing, registering his delight. It meant that he was ‘on fighters’.

It took several more weeks and another move to the operational training unit at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire before he finally took the controls of the aeroplane that would carry him through the rest of his war. ‘I at last went solo in a “Hurricane”,’ he wrote on Wednesday, 20 March, ‘and did five landings in fifty minutes. It is a grand aeroplane and not so very difficult…I can now wear the top button of my tunic undone, as is done by all people who fly fighters.’¹⁴

The remainder of Wissler’s time at Sutton Bridge was spent on Harvards and Hurricanes, frequently practising the disciplined formation manoeuvres that were still considered to be the best training for air flying. In the evening there was snooker and darts in the mess or at the Bridge, a local hotel. The war was moving closer. At the end of March a request was made for volunteers to go to France to replace casualties in the four fighter squadrons based there. Wissler put his name forward, then reconsidered after worrying about the effect such a move would have on his parents.

At the end of April there was another flap when it appeared that one of the pilots was being posted to Norway. His order to move was cancelled at the last minute. It was a small example of the chaos surrounding an enterprise that was ill-organized and amateurish from start to finish. Dowding had been asked to provide fighter cover for an expedition to secure the iron-ore fields of northern Sweden and provide help for the Finns, who had been showing unexpectedly strong resistance to the Russian invaders in their ‘Winter War’. Following the capitulation of the Finns to Moscow in March, the Germans had taken the opportunity on 9 April to seize ports and airfields in Norway as bases for an escalated war against Britain and the objective changed. The force was now charged with seizing them back and 263 Squadron was assigned to help them. The squadron had only been reformed six months previously and was equipped with Gladiators, which now had the look of museum pieces. It was facing 500 Luftwaffe combat aircraft, including 330 bombers. The pilots arrived near Trondheim on the evening of 24 April, having flown in from the aircraft carrier Glorious. Their base was to be on the ice of Lake Lesjaskog. The following morning the wheels of all the machines were frozen to the ice, the controls locked solid, and it was impossible to start the engines. To compound a hopeless situation, supplies supposed to have been waiting at a nearby port failed to arrive so there was no mobile radar, only two light guns for airfield defence and no petrol bowser or acid for the accumulators in the starter trolleys used to fire up the engines.

In the end these deficiencies were academic. The base was attacked by Heinkel 111s, which swept over, bombing and machine-gunning the Gladiators as they sat glued to the ice. The already demoralized ground crews, many of whom were new to the squadron, ran for the cover of the surrounding forest. By the end of the first day the squadron was reduced to five serviceable aircraft. By the end of the second day there were three, and on the third there were none. The squadron was withdrawn to re-form and re-equip. On 22 May it was back in Norway with its Gladiators as part of the force trying to capture Narvik, where it was joined by 46 Squadron, equipped with Hurricanes. This time it managed to operate on twelve days, flying 389 sorties and claiming to have shot down twenty-six enemy aircraft.

No. 46 Squadron also flew on twelve days and claimed eleven aircraft destroyed. It arrived in Norway from the Glorious, but had to return to Scapa Flow when the first airfield selected, near Harstad, turned out to be unusable. On their return they had to abandon a second base at Skaanland after two Hurricanes, including one flown by Squadron Leader Cross, ploughed into the soft ground and went tail-up, and the rest of the squadron was diverted to Bardufoss, sixty miles to the north. Flight Sergeant Richard Earp, who had gone to Halton from his Warrington grammar school before being selected for flying training, managed to land safely. He remembered Skaanland as ‘nothing but a strip by a fjord. The troops had been working very hard out there and they’d covered the place with coconut matting and wire netting. Poor Cross came along to land on it and it just rolled up in front of his wheels.’¹⁵ They washed in melted snow and lived six to a tent. ‘All I had was a groundsheet and two blankets. You couldn’t sleep. It was daylight all the time. It was terribly bloody cold.’ As the decision was taken to abandon the campaign, the squadron was withdrawn.

Earp left on a fishing boat and was picked up by a destroyer that took him back to Scotland. When he returned to the base at Digby he found that ‘there was hardly any of the rest of the squadron left’. On 7 June ten exhausted pilots of 46 Squadron managed to land their Hurricanes on the Glorious, despite the absence of arrester hooks, supposedly an impossible feat. No. 263 Squadron was already embarked. On the way back the carrier was sighted by the battlecruiser Scharnhorst, which opened fire at long range. The second salvo smashed into the ship, setting it ablaze. It sank within an hour, taking with it 1,474 officers and men of the Royal Navy and 41 members of the RAF, including all but two of the pilots. It was the final disaster in a doomed campaign. From the cold perspective of Fighter Command, it was also a terrible waste of men and machines which would be badly needed in the months ahead.