Читать книгу Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945 - Patrick Bishop - Страница 16

Although it had been long expected, the arrival of the blitzkrieg on 10 May still came as a shock. The night before, a perfect summer evening, 87 Squadron had received an order putting all pilots on readiness at dawn. ‘There was nothing unusual in that,’ the squadron diary recorded, ‘or in the accompanying warning that the blitzkrieg would start the following day. People had become a little sceptical. It was therefore with no little surprise that we were wakened before dawn by a tremendous anti-aircraft barrage, the drone of many aero engines and a deep thudding sound we had never previously heard. BOMBS!’ Shortly afterwards a Dornier raced in low over the small boggy aerodrome at Senon, near Metz, where pilots and ground crews were living in tents in the woods, and machine-gunned some French aircraft parked on the edge of the field.

There were similar rude awakenings at aerodromes all across northern France that Friday morning. In the Pas de Calais 615 Squadron was in the throes of exchanging its Gladiators for Hurricanes. ‘A’ flight was at Le Touquet when Heinkels arrived at dawn and bombed the airfield, damaging three Hurricanes. The pilots, billeted in a nearby chateau, assumed at first it was a French air exercise. ‘B’ flight was up the road at Abbeville, also re-equipping. Their base was attacked as well, but to little effect. The duty pilot, Flying Officer Lewin Fredman, gamely took off in a Gladiator to attack a Heinkel at 20,000 feet but failed to connect.

Peter Parrott, a twenty-year-old flying officer with 607 Squadron, was in the mess at Vitry having a cup of tea while waiting for a lorry to take him and two other pilots to the base to stand by. ‘We heard the truck pull up, a three-tonner, the usual transport. But instead of waiting with the engine running, the driver ran into the mess, which was an unheard of liberty by an airman…He said, “There are German aircraft overhead, sirs!” Then we started to hear the engines so we hurled ourselves into the truck and went up to the airfield. I didn’t stop running. I ran into the crew-room and got my kit on still running out to the aeroplane.’¹ As he took off, a stream of Heinkels was moving over the airfield, and he set off to catch them, firing every one of his 2,250 rounds without doing any visible damage. He would fly four more sorties that day to greater effect, shooting down two Heinkels and damaging another two.

During 10 May, the Luftwaffe launched heavy coordinated raids on twenty-two airfields in Holland, Belgium and north-east France, using more than 300 Heinkel and Dornier bombers. On the ground, the terrestrial component of blitzkrieg, the tanks and motorized infantry battalions, sliced through Holland and Belgium’s thin defensive membrane. In the air, the balance of forces and the weight of experience was overwhelmingly in the Germans’ favour. Their commander, Hermann Goering, had at his disposal 3,500 modern aircraft, many of them crewed by airmen who had seen action in Spain and Poland. The two air fleets – Luftflottes 2 and 3 – could muster 1,062 serviceable twin-engined bombers, 356 ground-attack aircraft (mostly Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers), 987 Me 109 single-engined fighters and 209 twin-engined Me 110 fighters. The average daily fighter strength that the RAF could pit against this, consisting of approximately forty Hurricanes and twenty Gladiators, was puny in comparison. The air forces of Holland and Belgium were also negligible. The main deterrent to the Luftwaffe in the West was supposed to be the Armée de l’Air. On paper it seemed equipped to put up a robust defence, with an available strength on the eve of battle of 1,145 combat aircraft. The vast majority of these, 518 of them, were single-engined fighters, supplemented by 67 twin-engined fighters. The bomber feet consisted of only 140 machines, and nearly half of these were obsolete.

Despite the obvious imbalance of the force, France should, in theory at least, have been able to inflict significant damage on the invading German bomber fleets, applying a brake to the momentum that was the essential element of blitzkrieg. But the French fighter strength was illusory. Only thirty-six of their machines, the Dewoitines, which could reach 334 m.p.h., had the speed to compete on anything like equal terms with the Me 109s. Most of the fighters were Moranes, which were underarmed and had a sluggish top speed of just over 300 m.p.h. The French early-warning system was primitive. Britain had let France in on the radar secret before the war, but little had been done to develop it, and on 10 May there were only six mobile sets in place, supplied by London. The main work of locating the direction of a raid and ascertaining numbers was done by a corps of observers who called in their sightings over the public phone system. Then there were the pilots. The men of the Armeé de l’Air were brave enough, and worked hard at their aviator élan. But many RAF pilots felt that something more than the spirit they showed in the mess and the night-club was required in the air. There was little attempt to coordinate the two forces or share tactical thinking or intelligence. Once the war began, each air force effectively fought on its own.

Given the Luftwaffe’s advantages, the first day of the onslaught in northern France was to turn out disappointing and surprisingly painful for them. The dawn raids failed to do serious damage to any of the airfields and the defenders were immediately in the air and hitting back. The pilots of 1 Squadron were active almost constantly from 5 a.m., shooting down one of a group of Dorniers near Longuyon as they raided a railhead and railway station nearby. Later in the morning they brought down another Dornier. Billy Drake, who had been separated while flying with his section near Metz, saw a condensation trail above him and went to investigate, only to find it was a Spitfire on a photographic reconnaissance mission. ‘The next thing I saw was a bloody 109 on my tail,’ he said. ‘When I tried to evade him he suddenly turned up in front of me and I thought, “Christ! I’d better start shooting at him.” Suddenly I looked up and there was a bloody great electricity cable in front of me. He knew the area and he lead me into it!’ Drake swooped under the high-tension cable and caught the 109 as it climbed away. ‘I gave him a couple of bursts and he went in and that was the end.’

It was the first time he had been in action. Even immediately afterwards he found it hard to recount the incident in any detail. ‘It was,’ he said later, ‘rather like having a motor-car accident. You can’t remember what the hell happened.’² The opening hours, then the whole of the French campaign, were to pass in a blur for many pilots as one sortie merged into another, day melted into day and perpetual exhaustion tinged the whole experience with the quality of a bad dream.

The fighting on the first day did not finish until 9 p.m., when pilots of 3 Squadron, which had been rushed to France that day along with 79 Squadron, knocked down three Heinkels. They were in action within a few hours of arriving at Merville. No. 3 Squadron had left hurriedly from Kenley after lunch. The few maps available were given to the senior pilots and the rest of the squadron followed their lead. No. 79 Squadron at Biggin Hill was given more notice and had time to arrange for mess kit and civvies to follow on in a transport plane so they would be suitably equipped to enjoy themselves in France. It was not to be. The RAF’s retreat on the ground had already begun and all subsequent movement would be backwards. During the day 73 Squadron had been pulled from its forward base at Rouvres to the supposedly more secure airfield at Reims-Champagne. No. 1 Squadron also moved hurriedly in the afternoon, from Vassincourt to Berry-au-Bac north-west of Reims. It was stiflingly hot when they arrived and the air was thick with mayflies. As they waited for the next sortie, a lone Heinkel detached itself from a flotilla overhead and dropped fourteen bombs that rippled across the field, sending the pilots diving for cover. No one in the squadron was hurt. A minute earlier, though, four farmhands had been working the neighbouring field. A shout alerted Paul Richey to what had happened.

We found them among the craters. The old man lay face down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck, oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by…Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy – recognizable only by a few tattered rags, a broken boot and some splinters of bone. The five stricken horses lay bleeding beside the smashed harrows; we shot them later. The air was foul of the reek of high explosive.³

The sight of dead civilians was to have a disturbing effect on many of the pilots who served in France, ruffling their careful nonchalance and stirring up feelings of detestation, even hatred for the enemy. That evening Richey flew the last patrol of the day over the aerodrome, noting the effect of the German visitation on the normally dull and tranquil landscape. ‘Smoke was rising from several towns and villages: bombed…Here and there farmhouses and barns were burning, and the sight of the lazy red flames licking up nauseated me; it was all so thoroughly evil and hellish.’

The last pilots bumped down on the grass airfields of Champagne, Picardie and the Pas de Calais in near darkness. It had been an extraordinary day. Altogether, the fighters of the Advanced Air Striking Force and the Air Component had flown 208 sorties. Between them, they claimed to have definitely shot down fifty-five bombers – Heinkels, Dorniers and Ju 88s – with a further sixteen probable. British losses amounted to seven Hurricanes shot down and eight damaged. Astonishingly, not one pilot was killed, and only three had been wounded.

The Luftwaffe themselves reckoned they had lost thirty-three bombers. Conflicting claims persisted throughout the air battles of the rest of the year. Wishful thinking, the confusion of battle and propaganda considerations inevitably inflated British figures. The Germans also exaggerated their successes and masked the extent of their losses, employing a system that fudged stark realities by assessing the damage to each aircraft in percentage terms. Whatever the discrepancy, it had been a bad debut for the Luftwaffe in northern France. The Hurricane pilots fell asleep believing, or at least hoping, that the Germans were less formidable than they had feared. ‘Am I browned off,’ complained Denis Wissler, who had missed the action, grounded because of his inexperience.

The first day was to turn out to be the best. Things had for once gone more or less according to plan. All the time put into perfecting the Fighting Area Attacks, precisely numbered and laid out in the pre-war training manuals, appeared to have been justified. ‘I have never seen squadrons so confident of success, so insensible to fatigue and so appreciative of their own aircraft,’ noted the satisfied Officer Commanding the Air Component, Group Captain P. F. Fullard. But it was beginner’s luck. The success which even relatively untested squadrons like 607 had enjoyed was due to the crucial fact that the bombers had arrived without any fighter escort in unconscious fulfilment of the Dowding prophesies as to what sort of war his squadrons would have to fight. The Hurricanes had been able to locate their targets with relative ease, simply because there were so many of them. The pilots arriving from England who were accustomed to Fighter Command’s by now reasonably sophisticated ground-control system found themselves operating without direction. Relying on reports of sightings from the French observers, interception orders were transmitted from wing headquarters to aerodromes by field telephone. The sketchy information that could be conveyed to the pilots in the air was often unintelligible because of the short range and poor quality of the R/T.

Setting off from Merville mapless into the dusk, Pilot Officer Mike Stephens of 3 Squadron had soon been separated from the rest of his section, and then lost. ‘We took off in whatever direction we happened to be pointing, hoping to catch the Heinkels,’ he wrote. ‘It was hopeless. There was no radar, no fighter control at all. We were wasting effort and hazarding aircraft in the hope of finding our quarry in the gathering darkness.’⁴ The official RAF daily report admitted that the fighters ‘had much too little in the way of an effective early-warning system’.⁵ In the confusion of the subsequent days, that deficiency could only get worse. Nor were the Luftwaffe to make the same mistake again. On the second day, when the bomber fleets returned, they brought the Me 109s and Me 110s with them.

The very limited strength of the France-based squadrons was to be bolstered by several squadrons from 11 Group, including some equipped with Spitfires, flying from bases in south-east England. The fighters of the AASF and AC, however, were overwhelmed by their workload. The Luftwaffe probed deeper and wider behind French lines. German reconnaissance flights roamed over the forward areas, reporting the progress of the French and British land forces moving by prearranged plan to block the anticipated German advance westwards from the Low Countries. At the same time, bombers began systematically tearing up the defenders’ lines of communication attacking aerodromes, railheads and bridges.

The squadrons went into action again at first light on the second day, Saturday, 11 May. Reims-Champagne aerodrome was bombed at 5 a.m. by Ju 88s. They were followed by two Dorniers. One of the raiders was brought down when 73 Squadron scrambled a section. The new arrivals from 79 Squadron at Merville also got into action early, shooting down a Heinkel spotted during a dawn patrol. At Berry-au-Bac, 1 Squadron spent the first hours setting up a new dispersal area, having decided the attack the previous day had probably been aimed at a concrete hut where they had first established themselves. The new arrangement consisted of a tent, a telephone to receive orders from 67 Wing headquarters and a trench and dugout to dive into in the inevitable-seeming eventuality of another raid. Now that the battle had really begun, Bull Halahan took his place at the head of his pilots, leading the first action of the day to confront Heinkel bombers, which turned back when they saw the Hurricanes.

The sound of gunfire and bombs rumbled around the airfields of northern France throughout the day, but the pilots had no clear idea of what they were supposed to do. No. 1 Squadron had been reprimanded by wing headquarters at Reims for taking off and chasing bombers on its own initiative. Their job, the pilots were told, was to await orders to escort Allied bombers trying to stem the German attack and to ignore any overflying raiders. Later on, after three large bombs were dropped outside the chateau where the headquarters staff were based, a request came through to mount a patrol in the vicinity.

The French-based squadrons were supported that morning by fighters which took off from bases in southern England on sorties over Holland and Belgium. Twelve Hurricanes from 32 Squadron were sent off from Biggin Hill to support the Dutch air force. They were directed to the aerodrome at Ypenberg, which they were told was in German hands. Pete Brothers led the attack as the CO had only just arrived at the squadron. ‘We arrived, and on the ground there were a large number of Ju 52 transport aircraft,’ he said later. ‘We dived to set them on fire and to my surprise there was nothing to shoot at. They were all burned out in the middle, though the wing-tips and tails were OK. We thought, that’s jolly odd. We whizzed around looking for something and found one parked between two hangars so we set that on fire and climbed back up again.’ It was not until several months later that the squadron discovered that Dutch forces had recaptured the aerodrome and had blown up the transports on the ground, saving one for escape to Britain only to see it destroyed by their allies.⁶

No. 17 Squadron, based at Martlesham in Suffolk, was ordered in mid afternoon to patrol the Dutch coast. The whole squadron took off in twelve Hurricanes, crossing into Holland just south of The Hague and turning north. It then split up, with the CO, Squadron Leader George Tomlinson, leading ‘A’ Flight back to circle Rotterdam while ‘B’ Flight headed on to The Hague. On the way, ‘A’ Flight was attacked suddenly by sixteen Me 109s, which swooped on them, breaking up the formation into a series of individual combats in what was probably the first mass dogfight of the war. Something of the hectic confusion was conveyed in the officialese of Flying Officer Richard Whittaker’s report. ‘Eight [came in] for the first attack,’ he wrote. ‘Afterwards a dogfight developed and I broke away and saw three 109s on the tail of a Hurricane. I did a quarter attack on his port giving a short burst, but had to carry on past him. I then saw another Me 109 and we circled each other feinting for position and I finally got on his tail. I gave him all I had. We had both been flying at very low speeds, trying to turn inside one another. At this point I commenced to stall and lost sight of the enemy aircraft temporarily.’ Breaking away, he flew through the smoke shrouding the coast and headed for home. Looking down he saw that ‘The Hague as a whole was on fire’. In the same mêlée, Sergeant Charles Pavey found that, when he did a steep turn to the left, a pursuing Me 109 ‘could not follow me round. I eventually got on to his tail and the enemy aircraft twisted and turned, diving down. I fired intermittently and finally gave him a deflection shot, finishing my ammunition. He then burst into flames, spinning down to the ground, and I followed him down until he struck the ground.’⁷

This was one of three definite 109s claimed by 17 Squadron on the second day, as well as two army reconnaissance machines. But with the first successes came the first losses. Flight Lieutenant Michael Donne was shot down and killed when his Hurricane crashed south-west of Rotterdam. Pilot Officer George Slee also died after being shot down south of Dordrecht. Two others, Pilot Officer Cyril Hulton-Harrop (brother of Montague, killed by his own side in the Barking Creek debacle) and Sergeant John Luck, managed to bale out after being hit and were taken prisoner. Squadron Leader Tomlinson’s Hurricane was badly damaged, but he managed to crash-land and make his way back to Britain. Every one of them had been the victim of an Me 109.

The hazards of peacetime flying had meant that death was never far away, but now the pilots were encountering it in a new and unfamiliar form. Denis Wissler was at Lille-Seclin when the Luftwaffe arrived at noon. ‘I came nearest to death today than I have ever been, when two bombs fell about thirty feet away,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I was in the ante-room and my God did I run.’ A driver was killed in the attack and a cook injured, and a block of sleeping quarters destroyed. That night Peter Parrot’s brother Tim was the co-pilot in a Whitley bomber sent on a reconnaissance mission over the German-Belgian border. In the morning Peter Parrot received a signal saying his brother was missing; later he was confirmed dead.

Mortality concentrated minds. That afternoon Paul Richey had been hurrying over to his Hurricane to intercept a big formation of bombers heading for Reims when he ran into an RAF Catholic chaplain he had met previously and liked. ‘He asked me if I wanted absolution, puffing alongside me. I confessed briefly. He asked if there were any other Catholics who might want absolution. I said, “Only old Killy in that Hurricane over there – hasn’t wanted it for ten years but you can try!” We laughed and I waved him goodbye. But confess Killy did – sitting in his cockpit with the padre standing on the wing beside him.’⁸ Richey was shot down an hour or so later, after an extended dogfight between five members of 1 Squadron and fifteen Me 110s. He baled out and landed in a wood, and after being found by some gendarmes was reunited with the squadron the following day. Five days later he was to take to his parachute again.

The shock of the first casualties was offset, to some extent, by the realization that, despite the high speeds and heavy fire-power now employed in aerial warfare, the chances of surviving a combat in which you came off worse were considerably higher than they had been during the First World War. From the outset it was clear that the news that someone was missing was not necessarily a euphemism for their almost certain death. On the morning of the second day Flight Lieutenant Dickie Lee of 85 Squadron had been injured slightly when his Hurricane was hit by flak near Maastricht and he decided to jump. He landed in a field close to where some tanks were parked on a road. He came across a peasant, who assured him the armour was Belgian. Lee borrowed an old coat to cover his uniform and went to investigate. The tanks were German. Lee was taken by the troops for a civilian, but none the less locked up in a barn, from which he soon escaped and made his way back to Lille, arriving two days later. On the same day his squadron companion, Pilot Officer John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, was also badly hit by flak, baled out, and returned unharmed to the unit.

By the end of the second day the fighter squadrons could be reasonably satisfied with their own part in the battle. Together they claimed to have destroyed a total of fifty-five enemy aircraft for the loss of thirteen Hurricanes and eight pilots. It was an overestimate. In one case, 1 Squadron reported that it had shot down ten Me 110s over the village of Romilly near Reims when the real number was two. The discrepancy was caused by confusion rather than wilful exaggeration. Air fighting was disorienting and distorted the senses, a fact acknowledged in the squadron’s daily report, which observed that ‘questioning pilots immediately after combat, it has been found extremely difficult to obtain [precise] information as to what actually happened as most pilots, after aerobatting themselves into a stupor, were still pressing imaginary buttons and pulling plugs [the override boost mechanism to increase power] an hour or so after landing’. Building an accurate picture was further complicated by the inevitable tendency of several pilots to describe the same incident as if it was their unique experience.

The performance of the British fighters was a welcome piece of good news in an overall story of failure. On the first day the general response of the Allied air forces to the German attack had been hesitant and did almost nothing to slow its advance, which proceeded with the speed and energy of a force of nature. The French commander, Gamelin, displayed a paralysing reluctance to provoke the enemy, fearing that if he authorized bombing raids the Germans would respond with a fury his tiny bomber fleet could do nothing to match. Barratt fumed, argued and finally went his own way, dispatching thirty-two Battle bombers against the Germans advancing through Luxemburg. Only nineteen of them came back, the rest having fallen victim to fighters and the German mobile light flak guns. A second attack was ordered and sixteen bombers flew off. This time nine were shot down from the ground or the air and four limped back badly damaged.

The Fairey Battles were disastrously unsuited to the demands of modern aerial warfare. They were slow, clumsy and poorly armed. The fighter pilots were impressed by the cheerfulness and courage of their crews, but even before the fighting began, no one gave much for their chances. On the first day, their vulnerability had been increased by the fact that no fighter escorts were assigned to them. On 11 May they went into action again in another attempt to blunt the thick black arrows already punching out in all directions across the HQ staff maps.

This time they were occasionally assigned fighters to protect them, but the results were still pitiful and the losses heavy. At 09.30 six Hurricanes from 73 Squadron had taken off from Reims-Champagne to protect a group of eight Battles ordered to attack targets in Luxemburg. Seven of the bombers were shot down. The following day, 12 May, five Battles, crewed by volunteers who were only too aware of the odds they were facing, were sent off again, this time with the mission to destroy two bridges spanning the Albert Canal in an attempt to hold up the German army, which had already captured two vital bridges across the Maas, just to the east. Eight Hurricanes from 1 Squadron led by Bull Halahan were ordered to provide cover. On the way to the rendezvous the fighters ran into a swarm of 109s. In the dogfight that followed they claimed to have shot down at least four 109s and two Henschel spotter planes. Halahan’s Hurricane was hit badly and he was forced to land. The Battles pressed on to their doom. Two were knocked down by the 109s before reaching the bridges. Two more were brought down by the flak batteries ringing the target. The remaining bomber crash-landed on the way home. Six crew members died in the raid and seven were captured.

The inadequacy of the support the fighters could offer had already been demonstrated the same morning when Hurricanes from 85 and 87 Squadrons were sent to meet up with twenty-four Blenheims, which had also been sent from RAF Wattisham in Suffolk to attack the bridges. On the way to the rendezvous the fighters ran into a succession of enemy formations. In the mêlée that followed, two 87 Squadron pilots were shot down and one of them, Flying Officer Jack Campbell, a Canadian from British Columbia, was killed. The other, Sergeant Jack Howell, managed to bale out, but his parachute only half-opened and he made a high-speed descent. The squadron diary noted that ‘although landing extremely heavily he found on recovering consciousness that he was no more than badly bruised and was flying fit within a week’.

The two were probably victims of a section of Me 109s led by Hauptmann Adolf Galland, who was to shoot down more RAF aircraft than any other Luftwaffe pilot operating in the West. In his memoirs he described closing in on the unsuspecting Hurricanes. ‘I was not excited, nor did I feel any hunting fever. “Come on! Defend yourself!” I thought as soon as I had one of the eight in my gunsight…I gave him my first burst from a range which, considering the situation, was still too great. I was dead on the target, and at last the poor devil noticed what was happening. He rather clumsily avoided action, which brought him into the fire of my companion. The other seven Hurricanes made no effort to come to the aid of their comrade in distress but made off in all directions.’⁹ The Blenheims were equally unsuccessful and suffered heavily at the hands of the fighters and the flak. Out of the twenty-four that set out, ten were lost.

It was now clear that there were nowhere near enough Allied bombers to make a difference, nor fighters to mitigate the devastating effects of the Me 109s and the flak batteries. The French bombing raids were as ineffective as the British and their Moranes and Dewoitines no real deterrent to the Messerschmitts. Even if the Allied air forces had been stronger, the resistance they could offer in the air would not have been enough to counter the fact that, on the ground, the battle was being lost.

A handful of reinforcements arrived in the evening of 12 May. Sixteen Hurricanes of 501 Squadron were sent off from Debden and divided themselves between Bapaume and Vitry-en-Artois. This piecemeal offering was unlikely to do anything to quieten the clamour for more aircraft that was coming from the French government and supported by Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister on the day the blitzkrieg began.

Dowding had always regarded the sovereign strategic objective of Fighter Command as the protection of the British Isles. He seems, from the outset, to have doubted France’s ability to defend itself. Well-founded pessimism, a cold streak of realism that contrasted with Churchill’s sometimes alarmingly romantic approach and a keen appreciation of the paucity of his resources led him to view the sending of any more fighters to the aid of France as an appalling waste. He would oppose every request for further sacrificial offering of pilots and aircraft. But the battle had already created a vacuum, drawing in pilots and machines in a futile effort to stem a German advance that was now flowing westwards with the inexorability of lava.

On 13 May, the first German tanks crossed the Meuse at Sedan, a psychological as well as political frontier. The more intelligent observers who had grasped the nature of blitzkrieg understood that this, most probably, meant the defeat of the Allies was inevitable. Churchill, by his own admission, had failed to appreciate that warfare now moved at what was a lightning pace by the standards of the previous war. Thus, he was relatively unperturbed by the news of a breakthrough, believing that, as on the Western Front a quarter of a century previously, the thrust could at the least be blocked. That day thirty-two more Hurricanes and pilots were ordered off to France to make up the losses. The Luftwaffe was now concentrating on creating havoc in the rear of the French and British armies, smashing road and rail links to prevent the forward movement of men and supplies and wrecking the already fragile communication network. From now on, chaos was to be the status quo.

The Allies’ ability to manoeuvre was dictated by the activities of the German bombers. While the Heinkels and Dorniers savaged supply lines, the Ju 87 Stukas moved ahead of the advancing Panzers. They had already proved their destructive power in Spain and Poland. The damage they did was as much to morale as to flesh, bone and metal. The mounting shriek of the sirens as they tipped into their dive was a devastating coup de théâtre that terrified even the most cool-headed troops. The Allied pilots, though, felt no concern about meeting them. Stukas could only manage a top speed of 238 m.p.h. and when cruising trundled along at just over 200 m.p.h. They were to prove a gratifyingly easy target for British fighters later on. But now, with the Me 109s in almost constant attendance, there were few chances of getting at them.

Despite the dramatic developments, 13 May was a quiet day. There was one raid by seven Battles over Holland, which was mercifully completed with damage to only one aeroplane. The French also sent seven bombers, with a heavy fighter escort, against troop concentrations in the Sedan area and the pontoons the German engineers had thrown across the Meuse. The effect was negligible. Ten Hurricanes were shot down, six of them, including Billy Drake’s, by Messerschmitts. He had been on dawn patrol with five other Hurricanes from 1 Squadron at 22,000 feet when he started ‘feeling very woozy. I looked down and sure enough I had no oxygen so I said I was going home. Round about 10,000 feet I saw these four [bombers] and it didn’t look as if they were being escorted by anybody. Just as I was firing away, I suddenly heard a bloody great thump behind me and a Messerschmitt 110 had obviously got behind and [blown] me out of the sky.’

He felt as if he had been struck hard in the back and the leg and flames were streaming from his engine. ‘I tried to get out but I’d forgotten to open the hood and the aeroplane was really brewing up by this time. I released the hood and went onto my back and that probably saved my life because all the flames that were coming into the cockpit went round the fuselage and missed me so I was able to bale out.’

As he floated down he heard the twin engines of the 110 above him, then tracer twinkled past as the Messerschmitt opened fire, apparently at him. He tried to accelerate his rate of descent by tipping air out of the canopy, but the pain in his back was too great for him to lift his arm. The German veered away and he hit the ground only to face another hazard. Drake was wearing an old white flying overall from pre-war days and his hair was very blond. The French peasants who ran to the scene ‘thought I was a German. They all had scythes and pitchforks and they were literally coming for me.’¹⁰ His parents’ investment in his Swiss education paid off when he yelled in French that he was a British pilot. When he showed them his wings they became effusively friendly and took him to a field dressing station in a school near Rethel that was crowded with casualties, several of whom died while he was being treated. He had two bullets in his leg, and shrapnel and bullets in his back. He was given morphine that did little to dull the agony as the debris was prised out, then moved to the town hospital.

When he did not return the squadron began to worry. Paul Richey had to collect something from Drake’s room after lunch ‘and saw his meagre possessions spread about…a photograph of his mother, a bottle of hair oil, the pyjamas he would need no more. Poor old Billy!’¹¹ Then a call came through from the hospital that they had an English pilot. Richey went to see him and plans were made to move him to British care. The next day, though, the hospital was evacuated and Drake began a long and painful journey westwards.

That evening eight pilots and Hurricanes from the new batch of reinforcements landed at Reims-Champagne to shore up 73 Squadron. They were being thrown in at the deep end. None of them had belonged to a squadron before, let alone seen action, having come directly from No. 6 Operational Training Unit. The following day more machines and men, many of them equally inexperienced, were spread around 607, 615 and 3 Squadrons. No. 1 Squadron also received some welcome arrivals when Flying Officer Crusoe and Sergeants Berry, Clowes and Albonico returned from a gunnery training exercise in Britain, making the last leg of the journey on a train that was bombed several times en route.

On Tuesday, 14 May, the Allied air forces made their first and last concentrated effort to stem the German advance now pouring through the gaps in the front around Sedan. Every available British bomber was mustered to destroy bridges on the Meuse on either side of Sedan and crush the heads of the columns thrusting into France, and a mixed batch of British and French fighters were ordered to protect them. Altogether eight attacks were launched on crossing points. The first raiders escaped lightly, protected from the flak batteries by the morning mist rising from the confluence of the Meuse and the Chiers. As the hot day wore on, the German gunners perfected their aim and the sky filled with watchful 109s and 110s. When the biggest raid of the day was launched in mid afternoon, the defences were primed. The first wave of twenty-five Battles, accompanied by French Bloch and Morane fighters, arrived at 4 p.m. local time and flew straight into a wall of flak. Then the hovering Messerschmitts descended to pick off the survivors. Eleven of the bombers and six of the fighters were shot down.

The second wave of twenty-three Battles and eight Blenheims was supposed to be guarded by Hurricanes from 1 and 73 Squadron. On their way to the target, however, the fighters were diverted by the sight of a formation of Stukas grouped over La Chesne, south-west of Sedan, where they had been sent to bomb French troops. The Me 109s protecting the bombers were slow to realize the danger. Killy Kilmartin shot down two, while Hilly Brown, Bill Stratton and Taffy Clowes claimed one each before the Messerschmitts intervened – figures that for once were subsequently broadly confirmed by the German reports. In the clash that followed, four 109s were shot down. No. 73 Squadron also ran into Stukas, destroying two and seriously damaging two more. Pressing on to their rendezvous with the bombers, however, they were ambushed by 109s and Sergeants Basil Pyne and George Dibden were shot down and killed. Earlier another 73 pilot, Pilot Officer Valcourt Roe, had also been killed over Namur. These encounters drastically increased the bombers’ vulnerability when they arrived over target. Of the twenty-three Battles that set out, only nine returned and five out of the eight Blenheims were lost.

The day saw the heaviest casualties Fighter Command had yet suffered. Fifteen pilots were killed and two so badly wounded that they subsequently died. Twenty-seven Hurricanes were shot down, most of them by Messerschmitts. The dead ranged from beginners like Flying Officer Gerald Cuthbert and Flight Lieutenant John Sullivan, who had arrived the day before, to some of the most seasoned pilots. Among the latter was Les Clisby and Lawrie Lorimer of 1 Squadron, who had set off at breakfast time from Berry-au-Bac with Prosser Hanks and Boy Mould to chase a large formation of Me 110s which had appeared overhead. On first seeing them, their inclination had been to leave them alone, but they were spurred into action by a fitter who urged them to set off in pursuit for the honour of the squadron.

Clisby was last seen going into a dive, the cockpit of his Hurricane belching smoke and flame after having apparently been hit by a cannon shell. No one saw what happened to Lorimer, who also went down. At first they were posted missing. But when there was no news, the other pilots anticipated the worst. Clisby’s unquenchable willingness to attack had persuaded Richey that he had ‘bought it’. Some time later French troops discovered two burned-out Hurricanes.

Clisby was a month short of his twenty-sixth birthday. The premature worry lines scoring his forehead made him look older. He had a square, heavy jaw, a wiry moustache and downward sloping humorous eyes. He was extrovert, profane, perpetually cheerful and addicted to flying. He had joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a cadet aged twenty-one, and after being awarded a permanent commission he volunteered to go to Britain in 1937, despite the talk of war. He had turned out to be the most effective of the squadron’s pilots, destroying at least nine German aircraft in his time in France, and he died not knowing he had just been awarded the DFC. Lorimer had been posted to 1 Squadron from 87 Squadron and had a reputation for being unlucky. This was the third time he had been shot down in five days.

The losses prompted a debate among the pilots about whether they could continue flying and fighting with such intensity. Pilots were carrying out as many as five sorties a day, of one and a half hours each, against forces that always vastly outnumbered them, taking off from often primitive airfields that were subjected to regular bombardment. Despite the danger, the privations and the exhaustion, morale and the will to engage the Germans remained largely intact. On the evening of 14 May, Flying Officer Frank Joyce and Pilot Officer Chris Mackworth of 87 Squadron were sent off on a reconnaissance mission over Louvain. Mackworth’s engine would not start, so Joyce went alone. On the way he ran into a large formation of Me 110s and immediately launched a single-handed attack which he sustained until he was wounded in the leg and had to crash-land. He was rescued by some Scottish soldiers and treated at a field hospital, but had to be constantly shifted as the Germans advanced. Gangrene set in and his leg was amputated.

Mackworth had eventually managed to get his aeroplane started and set off on his mission. He also ran into Me 110s while they were strafing a village close to a tented field hospital, attacked them despite their overwhelming numbers and was shot down. He managed to bale out, but his parachute caught fire and when soldiers found him he was dead. His friend Dennis David received a letter later from Mackworth’s father ‘to tell me that he had heard from one of the doctors at the hospital. They had buried Chris but had no means of marking his grave other than by writing his name on a piece of paper which they put in a beer bottle on top of it.’¹²

Despite the remarkable mental and physical robustness of the British fighter pilots, fear and exhaustion began to take their toll. Richey, who was sustained by a buoyant reservoir of optimism, admitted that by now ‘our nerves were getting somewhat frayed and we were jumpy and morose. Few of the boys smiled now – we were no longer the merry band of days gone by.’ After his first parachute jump he had already begun ‘to feel peculiar. I had a hell of a headache and was jumpy and snappy. Often I dared not speak for fear of bursting into tears.’¹³

There was to be no lessening of pressure on the pilots in the days to come. On 15 May the French government understood that the Battle of France was lost. This realization did not prevent a passionate request for more fighters. Churchill was woken at 7.30 a.m. by a call from the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who ‘evidently under stress’ announced in English: ‘We have been defeated,’ and informed him the front line at Sedan had been broken. Churchill candidly recorded that, to his mind, shaped as it was by the memory of the previous war, ‘the idea of the line being broken, even on a broad front, did not convey…the appalling consequences that flowed from it’.¹⁴ When Reynaud went on to beg for ten fighter squadrons, he was prepared to at least consider the plea.

The request was placed on the agenda of that morning’s War Cabinet meeting as the second item. Dowding was present and spoke forcefully to bury a proposal Churchill had already backed away from and which had little or no support elsewhere. It was decided that the prime minister inform Reynaud that ‘no further fighter squadrons should for the present be sent to France’.

Dowding understood, though, that the reprieve was likely to be only temporary. Sure enough, the following day, 16 May, his superior, Sir Cyril Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, decided himself that eight flights – the equivalent of four squadrons – should be detached from Fighter Command and sent to France. His initiative followed a conversation with the BAFF commander, Air Marshal Barratt, who had emphasized the terrible fatigue the fighter pilots were now suffering, and additional plans were made for twenty exhausted men to be rotated out for a rest and replaced with experienced pilots from home squadrons.

Churchill, whose attitude towards the expenditure of fighter reserves chopped and changed with the demands of the hour, agreed and the decision was taken at that morning’s War Cabinet meeting. It was not to end there. In the afternoon Churchill flew to Paris, where the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to him. He met Reynaud, his minister of national defence, Alain Daladier, and General Gamelin at the Quai d’Orsay with the smoke hanging in the air from piles of documents being burned in the garden in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans. Commanders and politicians radiated defeat and dejection while simultaneously appealing for yet more British aeroplanes.

Churchill’s earlier pragmatism was overwhelmed by a romantic desire ‘to give the last chance to the French army to rally its bravery and strength’. With an eye on posterity he also calculated that ‘it would not be good historically if their request were denied and their ruin resulted’. The telegram containing these thoughts was sent to the Cabinet, which agreed to send six more Hurricane squadrons to France. The practical difficulties of housing them on battered and vulnerable airfields meant that in fact the squadrons – the last remaining Hurricane units not to have contributed to the French campaign – remained based in England. The plan was that each morning three would fly over to a French airfield and operate there until the afternoon, when the other three would relieve them.

The effect was to reduce further what Dowding, in agreement with the Air Ministry, had set as the minimum number of fighters and pilots needed to defend the country. He had already opposed the earlier decision to send eight flights to France in a letter to the Air Council, reminding them ‘that the last estimate which they made as to the force necessary to defend this country was fifty-two squadrons, and my strength has now been reduced to the equivalent of thirty-six squadrons’. He closed by demanding that the ministry decide what level of fighter strength was to be left for the defence of the country and to assure him that, when that was reached, ‘not a single fighter will be sent across the Channel however urgent and insistent the appeals for help may be’.

All along the front the French were now in panicky retreat and the fighter squadrons were dragged along with them. At dawn on 17 May Halahan and the 1 Squadron pilots received orders to move immediately from Berry-au-Bac to Condé-sur-Mame, between Reims and Paris. Before leaving they destroyed two Hurricanes damaged beyond immediate repair by pushing them into a shell crater and setting them on fire. Many of the fighters lost in France were to go the same way. As the last Hurricane took off, the German bombers arrived, pounding the next-door village of Pontavert, a place of no military significance. The squadron spent only one night in its new home before being ordered to withdrew again, to Anglure, sixty miles to the south-east.

Passing through Reims on the way to Condé, the road party found the city deserted but the roads round about choked with refugees. The Germans were following a deliberate policy of attacking civilian columns to intensify panic, block the roads and further disrupt the Allied communications. Many pilots witnessed the carnage and felt disgust. One day, when Dennis David’s aircraft was unserviceable, he went for a walk near the airfield and met a column of Belgian civilians trudging into France.

The refugees were pushing prams and small handcarts, with a few horse-drawn carts, and there were even fewer cars. Women were carrying their babies, while toddlers staggered along holding their mother’s hand or dress. I borrowed an old motor bike from an army unit, and found a scene of desolation which it was impossible to describe. Old men, women and children, grandparents and babes in arms, not to mention dogs and horses, were strewn over the roadside, mostly dead but a few with just a flicker of life remaining. All had been torn to pieces by the bullets from strafing German aircraft, whose aim was to prevent the road being used by the British army, which was hoping to reinforce the British units already fighting the enemy further east. The whole episode utterly sickened me.¹⁵

Paul Richey, Sammy Salmon and Boy Mould came across a group of refugees passing through Pontavert. They piled up Salmon’s Lagonda with bread, bully beef and jam from the stores and distributed them while listening to their stories: ‘This child’s father had been killed by a strafing Hun; that young woman’s small daughter had had her brains ripped out by a bomb splinter.’ When they retold the stories later in the mess, there was at first a shocked silence. ‘Then a disillusioned Johnny [Walker] almost reluctantly said, “They are shits after all.” From this moment our concept of a chivalrous foe was dead.’¹⁶ There could be no comfort in the belief that German fighter pilots were above committing such atrocities. The normally languid Peter Matthews was sent one day to pick up a pilot who had crash-landed and ‘got mixed up with a terrible bombing and strafing of the roads. It wasn’t just the bomber aircraft who were doing the strafing. It was 109s and 110s. That didn’t seem to me a fighter pilot’s job in life.’¹⁷

The additional pilots and machines, and the daily squadron excursions from England, did little to curb the Luftwaffe’s freedom of action. The new pilots went up to be knocked down in what was becoming a battle of attrition that could end only one way. The newcomers plunged into an atmosphere of disarray, operating with minimal support and the sketchiest of orders. A pilot officer from ‘B’ Flight of 253 Squadron, who had just turned nineteen, arrived at Vitry on the evening of 16 May to be immediately confronted with a stark picture of what was happening. ‘We got out of our Hurricanes and there were two Lysanders [unarmed army cooperation machines] circling. Suddenly two Messerschmitt 109s came and shot them both down, and instead of rushing away or lying down we just stood there gawping at them.’ The flight was led by a forty-year-old Canadian, and comprised a sergeant pilot and four pilot officers, the latter ‘with no experience at all’. From the beginning to the mercifully swift end all was confusion. ‘We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We were stuck in a field. There was another squadron on the other side of the field and if we wanted to know what was going on, someone had to run across to find out…they had a telephone, we didn’t.’

On 19 May an order was passed to them to take off and climb to a given height. Most of the pilots had early-model Hurricanes with fabric wings, no armour plating, radios with a range of only two miles and wooden two-bladed propellers. The flight commander’s machine was fitted with a new variable-pitch propeller, which allowed a faster rate of ascent. ‘He was climbing…and we were wallowing about below him. All the instruction we got from him was, “Get the lead out, you bastards.” We couldn’t catch him up. He got shot down before we got anywhere near, and so did the sergeant pilot. Suddenly the air was full of aeroplanes all over the place. I shot at one but whether I hit it or not I don’t know. Someone was on my tail so I got out of the way. I found myself completely alone. I didn’t even have a map. I didn’t know where I was. I thought, well, when we took off the sun was over there, so if I go that way I must be going somewhere near [the base]. I saw an airfield and landed and it was Merville. The first bloke I saw was someone who trained with me.’ By the time he reached the base, ‘the other three had found it and landed…We waited and waited and there was no sign of the flight commander or the sergeant pilot.’ Both were dead. The next day the surviving pilots were ordered to fly back to England.¹⁸

Given the small size of the force, the losses of men and aircraft were brutal and unsustainable. On 16 May, thirteen Hurricanes were lost, five pilots were killed, four wounded and two captured. On 17 May, sixteen Hurricanes were destroyed. No pilot died, but one was taken prisoner. The following day thirty-three Hurricanes were shot down, seven pilots were killed and five taken prisoner. On 19 May, thirty-five Hurricanes were shot down or crash-landed, eight pilots were killed, seven were wounded and three taken prisoner. The following day only twelve Hurricanes were lost and three pilots killed, but by then the battle was winding down and the first units were beginning to evacuate back to England.

The squadron hardest hit was 85, which had seven pilots killed in ten days. On one day alone, 16 May, six of their Hurricanes were shot down, with two pilots killed and three burned or wounded. On 20 May three were killed in an engagement with 109s over Amiens, including the new CO, Michael Peacock, who had been in command only for one day, having taken over from the exhausted Oliver. Two more squadron leaders were to die, Lance Smith of 607 and from 3 Squadron Patsy Gifford, the dashing Edinburgh lawyer who had won a DFC for shooting down the first German raider of the war. At least one officer of glittering promise was among the dead, Flight Lieutenant Ian Soden of 56 Squadron, who had been expected to play an important role in Fighter Command’s war. He flew his first sortie in France on Friday, 17 May. The following day he was up at dawn, claiming a Dornier and later an Me 109. By 6 p.m. he was dead, shot down by an Me 110 near Vitry. Some pilots just seemed unlucky. Soden’s squadron comrade, Flying Officer Tommy Rose, who survived the Battle of Barking Creek, had been killed a few hours earlier.

The return on these losses could not be justified. The habitual overclaiming gave the impression that the fighters were knocking down at least two Germans for each British plane lost. Churchill even claimed the figure was ‘three or four to one’. We know now that in reality the ratio was far less advantagous. After the first two days, before the fighter escorts arrived in force, there were only two days, 17 and 19 May, when the balance rose to two-to-one in the RAF’s favour. More worryingly for the future, in the crucial contest between fighters, the Messerschmitt 109s and 110s shot down more Hurricanes than Hurricanes shot down Messerschmitts.

The fighters were engaged in a pointless struggle. That was not, however, how some of the pilots saw it. Looking down from the heavens, ranging the length and breadth of the front, the squadrons should have had a better notion of how the battle was developing than the soldiers on the ground whose vision was restricted to the field in front of them. They also knew from bitter experience the strength and ability of the enemy in the air. Yet, despite the evidence, the pilots were anxious to keep fighting. Their morale seems to have been partly sustained by the message in the score sheet, which, although it may have reflected something like the truth in the case of a squadron like No. 1, was far from an accurate portrayal of the overall picture. ‘We were sure we had the measure of the Germans,’ Richey wrote. ‘Already our victories far exceeded our losses, and the squadron score for a week’s fighting stood at around the hundred mark for a deficit of two pilots missing and one wounded. We knew the Huns couldn’t keep going indefinitely at that rate, but we also knew we couldn’t keep it up much longer without help.’¹⁹ Richey pressed in person for reinforcements, telling a visiting senior officer that sending sections of three or flights of six up to protect bombers was useless and that a minimum of two squadrons was needed to provide proper cover.

But the Luftwaffe was far better equipped for a long haul than the air forces facing them. The squadrons in place since the opening of the blitzkrieg had been in a state of exhaustion almost from the second day. ‘I have now had six hours’ sleep in forty-eight hours and haven’t washed for thirty-six hours,’ wrote Denis Wissler two days into the hostilities. ‘My God am I tired. And I am up again at 3 a.m. tomorrow.’ Pilots dozed off in mid-flight. Wissler’s squadron comrade Sergeant Sammy Allard was found asleep in the cockpit after landing one evening and it was decided to leave him there until dawn patrol next day. In the morning he was still unconscious, so he was put in an ambulance and sent to hospital. It was thirty hours before he woke up. The chaos and the influx of retreating French troops meant that beds were scarce. The pilots grabbed the precious chance of oblivion wherever it appeared, dossing down in abandoned houses, in barns alongside refugees, beneath bushes and the wings of their aeroplanes, or simply under the stars. Again and again they remarked how it seemed they had only closed their eyes minutes before they were awoken again. Sometimes it was not far from the truth, with warnings and move orders coming through at all hours, ruining the possibility of a clear stretch of undisturbed repose. Often, when they did lie down, sleep would not come easily, and when it finally descended they would be back in the cockpit, twisting, diving and shooting in a dream-replay of the day’s combats. They looked forward to sleep with sensuous yearning, noting the experience as a gourmet records a great meal. ‘I took off from Cambrai at about 7.30,’ wrote Wissler on 14 May, ‘after the best night’s sleep I have had since this business started.’

Food, by contrast, seemed unimportant. They kept going on bread, jam and bully beef, and drank in great quantities tea that the ground crews thrust into their hands as they clambered out of their cockpits. On the odd occasions when they were able to find a café that was open or not crowded out, the food tasted of nothing. No. 1 Squadron took over a café at Pleurs, next door to the Anglure airfield. ‘We all crowded in and mechanically shoved down bread, eggs and wine,’ wrote Richey. ‘It might as well have been sawdust.’ Women were even further from their minds. When the barmaid tried to flirt with Richey, he found her ‘quite pretty in a coquettish way but I could scarcely be bothered to look at a woman these days’.²⁰

French dread mounted as the Germans pushed closer. Rumours, many of which turned out to be horribly accurate, swirled through the towns and villages, washing over soldiers and civilians alike, saturating the atmosphere in suspicion. In this humid moral climate the pilots found that their allies could be as dangerous as their enemies. German tactics in Holland, where parachute troops had been dropped in advance of the main attack to wreak havoc behind the lines, made anyone descending from the sky an object of distrust, as Billy Drake had already discovered. Now peasants and soldiers were inclined to attack any parachutist without bothering to establish his identity. Pilot Officer Pat Woods-Scawen of 85 Squadron was shot down in a dogfight with 109s in which he accounted for one Messerschmitt himself. He baled out, to be shot at twice on the way down by French troops. British soldiers could be just as edgy. Squadron Leader John Hill, who was flying his first sortie with 504 Squadron after taking over as commander, was forced to bale out and was blasted with shotgun pellets by a peasant as he approached the ground. Having convinced them he was an English airman, he was then arrested by passing British soldiers, who accused him of being a fifth columnist. When he reached into his pockets to show some identification, they opened fire, forcing him to jump into a ditch. This aroused further suspicions and he was pulled out and beaten unconscious, only being saved by the intervention of a passing French officer who knew him.

Fear of fifth columnists was rampant, apparently with some justification. When Pete Brothers first landed with 32 Squadron to fly for the day from Moorsele in Belgium, they found 615 Squadron, who had by now moved there, ‘a bit jumpy, looking over their shoulders the whole time’. That morning a sergeant had failed to turn up at readiness. ‘They’d gone to kick him out of bed and they found he was lying on his back with a knife in his chest…They didn’t know if it was a fifth columnist or a refugee come to rob him or what.’²¹

The punishment the German bombers had inflicted on the soldiers and civilians below made them liable to rough justice if they landed behind enemy lines. Bull Halahan came across a crashed Heinkel. He asked some French Senegalese troops what had become of the crew, and was told they had been taken off and shot. Pat Hancock, who had arrived at 1 Squadron at the start of the fighting, was in Sammy Salmon’s big Lagonda when they saw a German descending by parachute into a field near Béthienville. ‘There was a greeting committee waiting for him,’ he said. ‘They had been tilling the field and now they wanted to kill him. Sammy said, “We can’t have this, Hancock. Bloody French.” His car instantly became a tank, through the hedge he went, into the field. We picked up the German. I put my RAF cap on his head and we dispersed the French far and wide.’²²

By 17 May the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, had accepted the hopelessness of the situation. He announced to his peers that he did ‘not believe that to throw in a few more squadrons whose loss might vitally weaken the fighter line at home would make the difference between victory and defeat in France’. He concluded that it would be ‘criminal’ to compromise Britain’s air defences further. Churchill agreed and two days later ordered that no more fighter squadrons leave the country whatever the need in France.²³

What remained of the eight reinforcement flights prepared to withdraw, most of them with only half the aircraft they had arrived with. On 20 May the Air Component squadrons attached to the BEF began to pack up. That evening 87 Squadron set off from Lille to Merville, the thirty-minute journey taking hours because of the blackout and roads clogged with troops and refugees. Roland Beamont described a ‘great mass…all pouring westwards…pushing perambulators, bicycles loaded up with blankets and pots and pans…As we tried to get through them in clearly marked RAF vehicles there was a great deal of hostility. I think they felt that here were the British running away.’²⁴

Dennis David flew to their new airfield to discover that ‘accommodation was nil in the village, and we…were thankful to have clean straw to sleep on in a pigsty’. As the morning passed and the traffic outside the airfield was joined by the same retreating Allied troops the squadron had seen at Lille, anxiety grew that they would never get away. All the rumours were bad ones. A young French officer told them ‘that Arras had fallen and that the Germans were advancing to the coast. Unbelievable! A battery of 75s stopped at our dispersal point and a harassed capitaine told us how Gamelin had been executed by the Paris mob and that the Germans had reached Abbeville [well to the south].’²⁵ Orders were given for the pilots to carry out strafing attacks on German troops on the road between Cambrai and Arras until troop carriers arrived to evacuate the ground crews, when they would switch to escorting them ‘home to England’. These last words, the squadron diary noted, had a profound effect. ‘An entirely new atmosphere was noticeable immediately the officers and men read that. A mixed feeling of regret at leaving hospitable France and an unpleasant feeling that should anything happen to the troop carriers or the Hurricanes we should be left very much alone in the world.’

By the following day they were home. Dennis David, who had been shot up in a strafing run, crash-landed but was evacuated in a passenger plane. After months looking down on the plains of northern France he was struck by ‘how small and green the fields of Kent looked’. He went home to Surbiton, where his mother sent him to bed. He ‘slept without moving for thirty-six hours. She became quite concerned and actually called the doctor, who said I was completely exhausted and should just be left to sleep.’²⁶ The sister squadron, 85, also made it back. ‘I came home last night,’ Denis Wissler scrawled in pencil in his diary. ‘Bath, bed, booze.’

Bull Halahan decided that his men had now had enough and asked permission for the longest serving pilots to withdraw. The core of the squadron, who had been in France from the first days, left together; including the Bull himself, Johnny Walker, Prosser Hanks, Killy Kilmartin, Bill Stratton, Pussy Palmer, Boy Mould and Frank Soper. Rennie Albonico, another of the originals, was not with them, having been shot down and taken prisoner on 21 May. Nor was Paul Richey. On the last big day of fighting, 19 May, he had attacked a formation of Heinkels, and after destroying one was caught in return fire. He was hit in the neck by an armour-piercing bullet and temporarily paralysed, only regaining the power in his arms when his Hurricane was 2,000 feet up and locked in a vertical dive. He was found by the French and moved erratically westwards to end up in the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly.

Billy Drake also passed through Paris after being collected from hospital in Chartres by an American girlfriend called Helen. Lacking uniform or identity papers, he was again taken for a German at a French roadblock and feared he was going to be shot as a spy until Helen persuaded them to let him go. They went to the Crillon, where she handed over her Buick, its tank miraculously full of petrol, and told him to head for Le Mans, where the British were regrouping. ‘The streets were crowded with refugees,’ he said, ‘and much worse, with soldiers without their rifles, just trudging. They’d had it. It was the most depressing thing I’ve seen in my life.’²⁷ At Le Mans there was an emotional reunion with the squadron members who had stayed behind.

Richey, too, eventually joined them after recuperating in Paris, savouring the last days of freedom the city would know for four years. One day, walking down the Champs-Élysées, he came across Cobber Kain sitting at a pavement café with a Daily Express journalist, Noel Monks. Kain had chosen to help with the re-forming of 73 Squadron, after those who remained of the surviving pilots returned to England, and was due back himself in a few days. He was young enough to still have acne, but his spirit was frayed. Richey ‘noticed that he was nervous and preoccupied and kept breaking matches savagely in one hand while he glowered into the middle distance’.²⁸

The following day Kain took off from the squadron base at Echemines, south-west of Paris, and started to perform rolls perilously close to the ground. Among those at the aerodrome was Sergeant Maurice Leng, a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner who was one of the first of the RAFVR pilots to be posted to a fighter unit to replace squadron casualties. ‘He’d taken off in…the last original surviving Hurricane of 73 Squadron with a fixed-pitch, two-bladed wooden airscrew,’ he said later. ‘He took off and came across the aerodrome, did a couple of flick rolls and hit the deck. That was it.’ The sympathy of the newcomers, who had hardly known him, was muted. ‘We all said, “How sad,” but we all said, “How stupid.”’²⁹

The judgement could have served for the whole air campaign. It petered out in a series of withdrawals westwards in ever deepening chaos. Nos. 1 and 73 Squadrons, two of the first four squadrons in, were to be the last out, together with 501, which had been in France since the start of the blitzkrieg, and 242 and 17 Squadrons, which were sent out early in June. No. 1 Squadron was now transformed, with a new commander, Squadron Leader David Pemberton, and an almost entirely new set of pilots. Pat Hancock, one of the replacement pilots, remembered the remaining weeks as ‘only retreat, anxiety and lack of knowledge as to what was going on. Communications were almost non-existent. Fighter control, as such, had vanished.’³⁰ In the first two weeks of June the unit moved four times, in the end taking the initiative to shift itself when it was impossible to contact wing headquarters to obtain orders. They finally left on 17 June. One party departed by ship, boarding two dirty half-loaded colliers at La Rochelle. Another flew from St Nazaire. The squadron had been helping 73 and 242 Squadrons to maintain a continuous patrol over the port to cover the embarkation of the RAF and the remnants of the British army in France. They were unable to prevent the last tragedy of the campaign, the sinking of the Lancastria, which went down with the loss of 5,000 lives when a German bomb sailed flukily through an open hatch. Pat Hancock chased after one of the raiders ‘for a hell of a way, firing at it but with no success’. Circling over, he saw the victims struggling in the water and threw down his Mae West life-jacket.

No. 17 Squadron was also sent to cover the evacuation, and set up base in tents on the racetrack at Le Mans on 8 June. The same day, Denis Wissler, back with 85 Squadron after a forty-eight-hour leave, was summoned by his commanding officer, Peter Townsend, who had taken over the squadron two weeks before, and told that ‘17 Squadron had wired and asked for two operational pilots and that he was very sorry but I would have to go, and that at once’. Wissler had only been with 85 Squadron for six weeks, but his first impression on joining was that ‘the mob seem damn nice’, and he had grown very fond of them. There were only two hours to say goodbye before he left for Kenley. He stopped on the way in London for a solitary, melancholy dinner at the Trocadero, where he ‘really got completely plastered and was put to bed by the wing commander’. The same kindly officer woke him up at 3.30 a.m. with some Alka-Seltzer, lent him his bath robe and sent him for a cold shower before he took off.

Wissler left with Count Manfred Czernin, who had been with him in 85 Squadron. Czernin was twenty-seven, born in Berlin, where his Austrian diplomat father was en poste. His mother, though, was English, the daughter of Lord Grimthorpe, the polymath who designed Big Ben, and he had been to Oundle public school. There was none the less more than a dash of Mitteleuropa in his manner, which made him the object of some teasing. He joined the RAF in 1935 on a short-service commission after a stint farming tobacco in Rhodesia, and served as a bomber pilot before joining the reserve. Unlike Wissler, he had already been in action several times in France and claimed to have shot down four Germans. The pair managed to get lost several times on the way to Le Mans, taking twelve hours over a one-hour journey. The squadron then spent several days patrolling over Rouen and Le Havre, both towns obscured by columns of black smoke coiling up from burning oil tanks. On 12 June Wissler at last had his first taste of fighting when the squadron spotted three Heinkels bombing troopships off Le Havre and attacked. He opened fire on one of the bombers and saw smoke coming from the starboard engine, but modestly did not claim to have shot it down. Czernin, however, fired at another Heinkel in cloud and claimed a ‘conclusive casualty’. On a later patrol Wissler had another new and unwelcome experience: coming under heavy ground fire. ‘It was most terrifying,’ he reported candidly in his diary that evening.

By now the evacuation was almost complete. The squadron returned to Le Mans after a patrol on the morning of Saturday, 12 June, to find the Naafi had gone leaving behind huge quantities of cigarettes and whisky, to which everyone helped themselves. The army had abandoned a batch of Harley-Davidson motor bikes. Pilots and ground staff took the opportunity to ride circuits round the famous track. The same day they moved to Dinard. On 17 June the pilots were at readiness all morning and broke off to eat at a local hotel. Members of a French squadron based at Dinard aerodrome were also there. Peter Dawbarn, a nineteen-year-old pilot officer with 17 Squadron, was among the English pilots who sat down to lunch. There was a radio in a corner of the dining room. When the news came on everyone stopped eating to listen. When the announcement of the capitulation followed there was silence. Then, ‘they all burst into tears’.³¹

The newcomers had formed a low opinion of the French. Pilots’ attitudes towards their allies differed, depending on when they joined the battle. Many veterans of the phoney war had enjoyed the company of their spirited fellow officers in the neighbouring escadrilles, even if they had not found them particularly supportive or even visible during the crucial phase of the Battle of France. No. 1 Squadron had a much-loved Frenchman attached to it as interpreter, Jean ‘Moses’ Demozay, who was to escape to Britain in an abandoned Bristol Bombay troop carrier and fight bravely and effectively for the RAF and the Free French for the rest of the war. The reinforcement flights and squadrons rarely saw the French. The few recorded encounters were not happy ones. Flight Lieutenant Fred Rosier of 229 Squadron put down at an airfield near Lille, after being nearly shot down in a battle, ‘to find the French were there, with brand-new American aeroplanes, fighters, and they were not flying. They were quite friendly, but I was livid…They were not participating in the battle at all.’³²

The French the replacement pilots saw appeared demoralized and apathetic. Peter Dawbarn and the 17 Squadron pilots had come across French fighter pilots on previous trips to Dinard, which they used as a base for patrolling, ‘but they never took off as far as I know. We kept taking off, they didn’t.’ The locals could also seem treacherous. The squadron was convinced that traitors were reporting their movements to the Germans. ‘The fifth column is operating here we are sure as Morse code starts every time we take off,’ wrote Wissler. The 17 Squadron Hurricanes left from Dinard, fuselages packed with cigarettes and alcohol, and landed at Jersey, where they celebrated their escape in Fighter Boy style with a party. When they left the following day, one Hurricane carried a passenger, a young woman who made the brief journey to freedom with the pilot perched on her lap.³³

Most of the Hurricanes that went to France never came back. Given the tight margins Fighter Command was working within, the campaign had been ruinously expensive in machines. Of the 452 fighters sent out, only 66 returned when the main force withdrew. Of the missing 386, German fighters and flak accounted for only 208. The rest were abandoned as unserviceable. This was no reflection on the ground crews, who worked continuously while being regularly bombed and strafed, with only a few hours’ sleep in tent or field to sustain them before going back on shift. All but intact aeroplanes suffering only light damage had to be set on fire because there were no spares, or the chaotic conditions made repairs impossible. The normally genial tone of No. 1 Squadron diary faltered when it came to describing the waste. ‘It has been most noticeable that on a patrol yielding no apparent results as many as two or three aircraft out of six may be struck by shrapnel and on return to aerodrome it has been found necessary to write off all three as u/s, due to lack of proper servicing and maintenance facilities…Wastage has so far been in the neighbourhood of thirty-eight, only ten of which have actually crashed. Apparently we in France are the poor relations.’³⁴

The pilots of Fighter Command could feel proud of their performance in France. Churchill had claimed that they were ‘clawing down two or three’ Germans for every British aeroplane lost. It was a vast exaggeration. The Hurricane squadrons reckoned themselves to have definitely shot down 499 bombers and fighters. The true figure was lower but it was at least 299. But with losses of 208 on their own side, it still left the RAF pilots well in the lead. Their success was their own. They were dedicated and aggressive and they made the most of their excellent machines. What they lacked was an effective early-warning system, or any proper control or direction from the ground. The pilots fought using tactics they invented for themselves for objectives that were never explained, if they were ever understood. Given these handicaps, the cost in lives looked relatively low. Altogether fifty-six pilots were killed in the twelve days between 10 and 21 May, and thirty-six wounded, with eighteen taken prisoner. But such losses could not possibly be borne over a long period, and as soon as this battle ended, a new one was beginning.