Читать книгу Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940 - Patrick Bishop - Страница 11

The new pilots had been recruited to fly a new generation of fighter aeroplanes, but the machines were painfully slow in reaching the squadrons. The first Hurricanes did not appear in service until January 1938, when 111 Squadron became the first unit to receive them. It was August, and the eve of the Munich crisis, before 19 Squadron took delivery of the first Spitfires. At the end of the year most fighter squadrons were still flying biplanes.

Ronald Brown, the ex-Halton boy who had been selected for flying training, was a sergeant pilot at Northolt with 111 Squadron when the Hurricanes arrived. The squadron commander and flight commanders were the first to test them. Then it was the turn of the junior pilots. They were told to keep the undercarriage lowered in order to reduce speed. The great power of the Merlin engine, twice as potent as anything they had previously known, would take time to adjust to, it was thought. Brown, even though it was the first time he had handled a monoplane, in fact found it ‘quite an easy plane to fly’.¹ Most pilots’ accounts of their experience of the Hurricane, however, reveal a mixture of trepidation and elation. Roland Beamont remembered ‘a feeling of exhilaration with all this power and being able to get up to 300 miles an hour on the air-speed indicator very easily in a shallow dive at any point in your flight. This was a great experience for an eighteen-year-old.’² The Gloster Gauntlets and Gladiators, which represented the zenith of biplane fighter design and served as a stopgap with many fighter squadrons while the new monoplanes were brought in, could manage only 230 and 255 m.p.h. respectively.

For pilots used to biplanes, the Hurricane seemed to take a long time to get airborne. Initially it had a fixed-pitch, twin-bladed propeller that only allowed one setting. With variable-pitch propellers, which were soon to come in, the pilot put the airscrew in ‘fine’ for take-off. This provided less speed but more power, giving maximum thrust – the equivalent in motoring terms of first gear. Once aloft, the pilot changed to ‘coarse’, altering the angle of the propeller blade so that it was taking bigger bites out of the air, generating less power but more speed. Later both types would be fitted with constant-speed governors that adjusted the blade angles automatically. Beamont thought flying a Hurricane was ‘simple, straightforward’. Christopher Foxley-Norris found it reassuring. ‘You get into an aircraft and it gives you confidence. You get into another one and it doesn’t…[The Hurricane] was very stable but at the same time manoeuvrable. If you didn’t want it to do a turn it was absolutely rock stable. If you did turn it was very manoeuvrable.’³

The Hurricane was slower than a Spitfire but could turn more tightly. Its wide-legged undercarriage, which opened outwards, planting the aeroplane firmly on the ground, made it ‘very forgiving’, another advantage over the Spitfire, which balanced on a narrow wheelbase. The initial canvas-and-girder construction of the fuselage meant bullets and cannon shells could go straight through it without bringing the aircraft down, and its sturdy wings provided solid bracing for the eight Brownings. It was, everyone said, an ‘excellent gun platform’, better, in fact, than the Spitfire. The machine guns were arranged in two groups of four, as close in to the fuselage as they could be placed to clear the propeller. The Spitfire’s armament was spread out, with the outboard gun a third of the way in from the wing-tip; then a group of two, then an inboard gun on each wing, which could cause some flexing when the guns fired, making them less accurate. The Hurricane was fast and nimble but honest. It was not quite perfect. Pete Brothers discovered ‘it could fall out of the air if you mistreated it trying to be too clever’.

The arrival of the new fighters aroused the fervent interest of newspapers and newsreel companies. Brown remembered them making ‘an absolute meal of the Hurricane. We were wonderboys, travelling at vast speeds, pulling all this G [the heavy gravitational force exerted when turning]. We were getting constant visits from the press and staff colleges who wanted to see these things in action.’⁴ Having appeared before the Spitfire, the Hurricane was the first to plant itself in the public imagination, though its primacy did not long survive the arrival of its more beautiful sister. The public perception that it represented a battle-winning technical advance was encouraged by a government and military establishment anxious to reassure citizens that the criticisms of the rearmament lobby were unfounded. Some pilots, used to the fixed wheels, open cockpits, broad flying surfaces and manageable speeds of the old types, wondered whether they would be able to cope. The difficulties which 111 Squadron had in making the transition were not reassuring. Some pilots simply could not adjust. Several were killed. One Australian pilot took off without realizing the wheel brakes were engaged. He only avoided crashing on take-off and landing because the field was so muddy the aeroplane slithered through the grass. When he made a subsequent landing without lowering the undercarriage, he was rapidly posted away.

Pilots liked the Hurricane’s chunky lines and solid profile. The lean, curved elegance of the Spitfire inspired something more profound. There was never ‘a plane so loved by pilots’, wrote Hugh Dundas.⁵ ‘Everybody wanted to fly a Spitfire,’ said Jeffrey Quill. ‘Most pilots used to want to fly the best. It certainly was the best.’ Quill knew the quality of the machine better than anyone. He was a test pilot at Supermarine and had taken the Spitfire through the most difficult stages of its development, as the design team struggled to overcome profound technical problems that were preventing it from making the evolutionary transition from being a very good aeroplane to a great one.

Quill was intelligent, shrewd and popular in both air force and civilian aviation circles, as much for his good nature as his superb abilities as a pilot. His father was Irish, an engineer who among other things had built Sierra Leone’s water system before retiring to Littlehampton in Sussex. He died in 1926 when Jeffrey was thirteen and a schoolboy at Lancing. As a young boy he watched the aeroplanes at the RFC base at Ford, near the family home. He decided early on to go into the air force, but he was the youngest of five children and there was little money. He had to forgo Cranwell, where his family would have had to support him for two years, and applied instead for a short-service commission. His first posting was to 17 Squadron, flying Bulldogs. Then he joined the Meteorological Flight at Duxford, which made daily sorties to take weather-forecasting readings, dangerous work that was given only to very good pilots. He hoped for a permanent RAF commission. But even in 1935, with expansion under way, his prospects were not sure and with some misgivings he accepted an offer to join Supermarine as an assistant to its chief test pilot, Mutt Summers, working on the Spitfire.

Progress was fitful. The prototype could not reach the 350 m.p.h. expected of it, only scraping up to 335 m.p.h. The propeller was one problem. It had been supplied by an outside contractor. A new one was designed by the Supermarine team and added an extra 13 m.p.h. Then the body surface was not smooth enough. Sinking rivets into the skin of the airframe would have brought better aerodynamic efficiency, but doing so would take much time and money. The team stuck split peas on the prototype to simulate round-headed rivets, which were much simpler to punch, then progressively removed them during aerodynamic tests to see which surfaces absolutely required flush rivets and which did not.

Failure to solve these problems and reach the performance levels Mitchell had claimed for his design could have meant the Spitfire never going into service. Quill and the rest of the team knew what was at stake. Later he revealed how close the decision had been. ‘A lot of people felt that the Spitfire, although it had a very good performance…had been bought at too high a price. In terms of ease of production it was going to be a much more expensive and difficult aeroplane to mass produce. In terms of the ease of maintenance it was going to be a much more complicated aeroplane to look after and service…For instance, you could lower the undercarriage of a Hurricane and take the wings off because the undercarriage was in the centre section…You could take the wings off, put the tail up on a three-ton lorry and tow it along the road. You couldn’t do that with a Spitfire. If you took the wings off…it took the undercarriage off as well…There were a lot of people who were against the Spitfire for those practical considerations. Therefore if we had not been able to show a really definite advantage over the Hurricane, it probably wouldn’t have been ordered. We were well aware of that.’

A final, crucial question had to be settled. In May 1936 a prototype was sent to the RAF Aircraft and Armament Establishment at Martlesham for trials by the service’s test pilots. Before the programme was complete, the research and development representative on the Air Council, Wilfred Freeman, asked the establishment’s flight commander Flight Lieutenant Humphrey Edwards-Jones, whether the Spitfire could be flown with relative ease by ordinary squadron pilots. ‘Old “E.-J.” quite rightly said, “Yes, it can,”’ Quill said later. On the strength of this judgement, before any performance testing had taken place, the decision to order was made. Quill reckoned there would have been ‘an awful delay if he’d hedged about that. It was one of the best things ever done.’⁶

No. 19 Squadron had been chosen as the first unit to receive the Spitfire because of its record of superlative flying, demonstrated at displays around the country by an aerobatic team which performed such impressive but not necessarily militarily useful stunts as flying in rigid formation tied together with ropes. The five pilots selected to put the Spitfire through a 500-hour series of tests included two sergeants, George Unwin, the Ruislip apprentice, and his best friend Harry Steere. Unwin was particularly struck by the sensitivity of the controls. ‘There was no heaving or pulling and pushing and kicking, you just breathed on it. She really was the perfect flying machine. She hadn’t got a vice at all. She would only spin if you made her and she’d come straight out of it as soon as you applied opposite rudder and pushed the stick forward…I’ve never flown anything sweeter.’ The Spitfire’s engine note was instantly recognizable to those who had flown it, and distinct from that of a Hurricane, even though they both had the same Merlin power unit. Many years later Unwin was coming out of Boots in Bournemouth with his wife when he heard ‘that peculiar throaty roar…I said to her, “There’s a Spitfire somewhere.” A taxi driver was standing there and said, “There she is, mate.” It is a noise you will never forget.’⁷

Brian Kingcome believed ‘it had all the best qualities an aircraft could have. It was docile, it was fast, it was manoeuvrable, it was gentle…it did everything you asked of it.’⁸ John Nicholas of 65 Squadron accompanied Kingcome to the Supermarine airfield at Eastleigh, Southampton, where Jeffrey Quill showed them the controls. He warned them that ‘everything was sensitive…it was so light on the controls, index finger and thumb would fly it’.⁹

There were disadvantages, too, the first of which was immediately obvious at take-off. The undercarriage hydraulics were manual and the wheels had to be pumped up by lever with the right hand. There was a natural tendency to waggle the control column back and forth during the manoeuvre, and new pilots were recognizable by the way they pitched and yawed after they got airborne. This problem disappeared with the fitting of a power pump. It was easy to forget the propeller adjustments that had to be made to the Spitfire, the same as they did to the Hurricane. Brian Considine, a trainee executive with Unilever who joined the RAFVR at nineteen, had only flown fixed-pitch propeller biplanes when he was sent to join 238 Squadron at Tangmere. He was given one short trip in a single-wing Master trainer as preparation for his Spitfire debut. He ‘took off in fine pitch and promptly forgot to put it back into coarse pitch, and did a few circles round the field thinking how marvellous it was…I made a nice landing and as I taxied in I could see the CO jumping up and down like a monkey in a rage. When I got out he told me I had wrecked the thing. I hadn’t, but it was all covered in oil.’¹⁰

The Spitfire had a very long nose, which allowed the pilot virtually no forward vision when tilted on the back wheel in the taxiing position. To see ahead it was necessary to swing the aircraft from side to side. The centre of gravity was also unusually far forward, so a heavy foot on the brakes would tip the machine on to its propeller. But these, the infatuated pilots believed, were foibles not faults. The Spitfire was certainly a better aeroplane than the Hurricane and at least the equal of its German rival, the Messerschmitt 109. The former it could out-climb and out-dive. The latter it could out-turn. It was still in service in its Mark XII incarnation at the end of the war when the Hurricane had been phased out and replaced by the Typhoon. Brian Kingcome judged that ‘the Hurricane was already more or less at the peak of its operational and design potential when it first came into service…its future was strictly limited by its rugged, uncouth airframe…The Spitfire, by contrast, possessed a unique capacity for development.’¹¹

None the less the competitive spirit that the RAF, and particularly Fighter Command, fostered meant that the Hurricane pilots were loyal to their machines, maintaining to the last that they would not have swapped them for a Spitfire if given the choice. No. 111 Squadron pilots had had to endure some mockery at the time it took them to master the new fighters and finish the 500 hours of testing. George Unwin remembered that, as soon as they could muster twelve aircraft, the first thing they did was to come down to 19 Squadron at Duxford to ‘beat up’ the aerodrome, as the RAF called the practice of flying low and fast over bases to impress their rivals – or show off to girlfriends. Once 19 Squadron was able to do so, it flew over to Northolt and returned the compliment.

The re-equipment programme went slowly, moving at the limited pace that peacetime industrial capacity allowed. By the late summer of 1938 it seemed alarmingly out of step with events. The Munich crisis of September 1938 showed how swiftly the RAF might be called upon to act, and how unprepared it was to do so. As it broke, there were just six squadrons equipped with Hurricanes, only half of which were combat-ready. No. 19 Squadron had only three Spitfires, which were armed with machine guns but lacked gunsights. The remaining sixteen operational squadrons had Gladiator, Gauntlet, Demon and Fury biplanes to oppose the sleek, modern might of the Luftwaffe.

As the crisis deepened, officers of 1 Squadron and 43 Squadron joined aircraftmen in the hangars to cover the gleaming silver paint that usually decorated the Furies – to show them to their best advantage in formation flying and aerobatics – with dismal shades of camouflage green and brown. Billy Drake and his comrades were ordered to sleep in the hangars, next to the aircraft to be at full readiness. No one knew quite what to expect. ‘I think we had an idea that they would go for us on the airfields, but nobody really seemed to have any strategy in mind – not at our level anyway.’¹²

At Biggin Hill, 79 Squadron was recalled from leave and on 27 September the auxiliaries of 601 Squadron were summoned to move from Hendon to the station, which had been designated their wartime base. At Hornchurch, 54, 74 and 65 Squadrons were called to immediate readiness and some pilots slept in crew rooms close to the aircraft. No. 74 Squadron had to abandon a gunnery practice camp at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire and return home, where they obliterated the squadron badges and tiger stripes adorning the fuselages of their Gauntlets and Gladiators, mixing up the paint from the colours available in the stores when the green and brown ran out. Al Deere, now with 54 Squadron, found it ‘a heartrending operation having to desecrate one’s beautiful Gladiator’. With the return of Chamberlain, waving his assurance from Hitler, the crisis fizzled out. The sigh of relief that gusted across Britain was not shared by all. ‘It is callous and wrong to say it, but when “peace in our time” was agreed, I was horribly disappointed,’ Deere admitted later.¹³

The likelihood of the Luftwaffe bombing Britain in the early autumn of 1938 was small, but the scare the crisis engendered was real and had the useful effect of speeding up the delivery of Hurricanes and Spitfires. The episode also blew away the last wisps of complacency that clung to the air force about what the future held. Politicians might maintain that this time Hitler could be trusted and a cataclysm had been averted rather than simply postponed. But many of the young pilots, and those who commanded them, now believed that a clash with the Luftwaffe was inevitable.

By the end of 1938 the Furies disappeared from Tangmere and Hurricanes took their place. Paul Richey arrived there in March 1939. He was in his twenty-third year and had been brought up in Switzerland, France and Albania, where his father, a veteran of the trenches, had helped to organize King Zog’s gendarmerie. He was commissioned in 1937 and already knew Tangmere from visits during training. Posted there to join No. 1 Squadron, he noted the new atmosphere.

Half the pilots in each squadron now had to be permanently available on station in case of a German attack. Gone were the carefree days when we would plunge into the cool blue sea at West Wittering and lie on the warm sand in the sun, or skim over the waters in Chichester harbour, in the squadron’s sailing dinghy, or drive down to the Old Ship at Bosham with the breeze in our hair and knock it back under the oak rafters. Our days were now spent in our Hurricanes at air drill, air firing, practice battle formations and attacks, dogfighting – and operating under ground control with the new super-secret RDF (the name then given to radar).¹⁴

It was the same for everybody. The pleasant old arrangements of no flying after 4 p.m., and weekends and Wednesday afternoons off, were dropped and the tempo of practice and training quickened. The activity was intense but lacked direction and seemed curiously disconnected from the realities of aerial warfare as had been demonstrated by the German and Italian air forces in the skies over Spain. The preparations also seemed to lack consistency, with different squadrons following different programmes. It would soon become clear that some skills vital for success and survival in the changed conditions of air fighting were miserably under-taught and in some cases ignored altogether.

Tactical training before the war was based on two premises that would turn out to be fatally mistaken once the conflict began. The first of these was that close, tight formation flying concentrated force in such a way as to make fighters both more destructive and more secure. The second was the expectation that they would be facing fleets of bombers arriving in waves, capable of defending themselves with onboard guns but unprotected by escorting fighters. The logic of the assumption was that the Luftwaffe would be confined to its German bases and its Me 109s would not have the range to accompany the bombers.

Those who survived the war complained that the RAF had a drill-hall mentality, exalting the sort of flying discipline exemplified by 19 Squadron’s aerial rope trick. There was a useful point to close formation flying. It helped groups of aeroplanes to move through cloud without colliding or losing contact with each other. But good formation drill was also seen as the basis of good tactics. Al Deere wrote later that ‘the majority of our training in a pre-war fighter squadron was directed at achieving perfection in formation with a view to ensuring the success of the flight and squadron attacks we so assiduously practised’. These were known as Fighter Area Attacks, and were numbered from one to five, depending on the fighters’ line of approach and the number of bombers. Thus, No. 1 involved a section of three or a flight of six fighters attacking one after the other a single bomber from astern. In No. 2, two or more fighters attacked a single bomber in line abreast, and No. 3 envisaged three fighters coming at a single bomber simultaneously from rear, beam, and rear quarter. It was all very theoretical and, as it turned out, of little use. But theory was all there was to go on.

‘The order to attack was always preceded by the flight commander designating the number of the attack, viz. “FAA attack No. 5 – Go!”’ Deere wrote later. ‘These attacks provided wonderful training for formation drill, but were worthless when related to effective shooting. There was never sufficient time to get one’s sights on the target, the business of keeping station being the prime requirement.’¹⁵ Pete Brothers and the rest of 32 Squadron at Biggin Hill prepared for war by following rigid scenarios that proposed set responses to set situations, practising on ‘enemy bombers’ that flew stolidly on, disdaining to take any evasive action. ‘If there was a small number of bombers your twelve aircraft would be divided up into sections of three. Then three of you would have a go at one bomber, one after the other. If there was a large number, you would spread out into echelon starboard [diagonally] setting it all up and giving them plenty of warning you were coming. It must have been all theoretical because no one had actually fought in these conditions before.’¹⁶

The tactics taught to George Unwin in 19 Squadron were ‘more suited to the Hendon air display’ than the realities of war. When put into practice for the first time over Dunkirk, the results were to be disastrous. The severe limitations of the pre-war tactical approach was to become apparent almost immediately, but this did not stop it being taught well into the war. Roger Hall, a young, pre-war professional soldier who transferred to the RAF, was posted to 152 Squadron at the height of the fighting in September 1940 after only a week’s operational training. He remembered during his instruction being ‘briefed on how to attack a bomber, but it was so perfunctory really that it was almost ludicrous.’ Three pilots were designated to take off in their newly acquired Spitfires and ‘attack’ a Wellington which was playing the role of an enemy bomber. Green though he was, Hall knew that ‘when you attack a hostile bomber they try to get out of the way. But this particular one was simply flying straight and level…The drill was to get above the bomber and the first Spitfire would come down and shoot its port engine and then it would break away. The next one would come and shoot the starboard, then that would break away. Then the third one would come down and shoot the body of the machine and then break away, but all the time the Wellington was just going straight and level, just asking for it…I used to laugh about that.’¹⁷

Brian Kingcome recalled that ‘fighter versus fighter wasn’t really envisaged or catered for’, and the assumption was that if they did take place they would be ‘pretty much as they were in the First World War except that you had faster, better aircraft and the huge advantage of a parachute’. None the less individual pilots did get in unofficial practice, going off in pairs to chase each other around the sky.¹⁸

The pilots who went into action for the first time in 1939 and 1940 might have known a lot about flying. They knew little, though, about how to fight in the air and less about how to shoot. Aerial gunnery was supposed to be taught as part of training and each regular fighter squadron was expected to go to an annual camp at one of the armament training stations for practice with live ammunition, shooting at drogues towed behind other aircraft, or at ground targets. This was occasionally supplemented by the use of camera guns, from which theoretical scores could be deduced. It was all a long way from reality.

In retrospect the amount of time spent on what was a fundamental air skill would seem desperately inadequate. ‘Looking back,’ Al Deere wrote afterwards, ‘I can see how dreadfully we neglected gunnery practice, live or by means of cine-films, and what an important part it plays in the part of a successful fighter pilot…squadron morale carried us safely through the early fighter battles of the war, not straight shooting.’¹⁹

Some pilots never fired at an aerial target before going into action. Tony Bartley, the son of a colonial service judge, who was awarded a short-service commission after leaving Stowe school, did his training before the war. Yet the first time he aimed his guns at a flying object was when he shot at an Me 109 in May 1940. George Unwin was fortunate in having Harry Broadhurst, an outstanding shot, as his flight commander. ‘Training in shooting was nonexistent. No one ever taught you how to shoot. But he did.’ Broadhurst emphasized ‘that the key to shooting was to get in close and the closer you got the more chance you had of hitting’. Unwin, who became a gunner instructor later in his career, found that one of the biggest weaknesses among fighter pilots at the beginning of the war was their inability properly to calculate how far they were from the aircraft they were attacking, often opening fire long before they reached what combat experience would teach was the optimum range of 250 yards. In the pre-war days, when aircraft were still equipped with a simple ring sight, Broadhurst taught his charges to work out the distance of the target by measuring it against the diameter of the circle. At 400 yards a bomber the size of a Wellington exactly filled the sight. At 250 yards, the ring was just outboard of the two engines. It was simple and effective, but according to Unwin never taught systematically.

The apparent explanation for the lack of firing practice was that, with tight financial restraints on the expansion programme, the Air Ministry had decided that spending money on the aircraft and pilots needed to man and equip the new squadrons took priority over new ranges, and so allowances for practice ammunition were cut to a minimum. There was no such excuse in 1940. By then shortage of time was to blame for a continuing failure to teach raw pilots how to shoot before throwing them into battle. When Archie Winskill, a softly spoken RAFVR volunteer from Cumberland, reached 72 Squadron at Biggin Hill on 4 October 1940, he was ‘well-schooled in formation flying and tactics but regrettably with no air-firing experience. I’d only fired my guns once into the sea off Liverpool…We knew nothing about deflection shooting.’²⁰

What was needed to attack successfully was the skill to manoeuvre into a favourable position, the ability to judge the correct range to open fire, and finally, and usually equally importantly, the knowledge of how to angle the shot so it stood the best chance of hitting the enemy aeroplane. The latter was deflection shooting. In all but full-on frontal or rear attacks, shooting in a straight line was useless. To strike the target required ‘laying off’, in the same way that a game shooter aims ahead of the pheasant so that the bird flies into the spread of pellets. The principle was recognized in the clay pigeon range installed at pre-war Tangmere and copied later in the war at many fighter bases. Some of the most deadly pilots, like Bob Tuck and Adolph Malan, attributed at least some of their success to their skill with shotguns. The importance of deflection shooting was obvious. Winskill was not to learn it until he was sent off to a gunnery course long after the 1940 crisis had passed.

The pilots of Fighter Command also went into the war with little idea of what they would be shooting at. George Unwin ‘didn’t know a thing’ about the Germans’ strengths, aircraft types and likely modus operandi before he met them in the air. At the time of Munich, the British air attache in Berlin made a tour of squadron bases and delivered a lecture about the Luftwaffe. But detailed intelligence briefings on the enemy were never given on an organized basis before the fighting began, and during the battles of 1940 pilots were seldom allowed a glimpse of the bigger picture. Their knowledge was confined to what had happened to them and their companions on the base, or what they heard on the radio. These shortcomings in training and preparation would only become fully apparent when revealed by the stresses of combat.

The approach of the cataclysm forced the pilots to think about the future. That the crisis was coming to a head seemed surprisingly comforting to some. Watching Europe’s tottering, somnambulistic progress once more towards the precipice induced feelings of restlessness and a desire to get the inevitable over with. Peter Townsend, who at the time of the Abyssinian war had been sickened by the thought of the effects of bombs on men, found the sight of the enemy, clear and unambiguous, was a liberation. ‘A complete change of mind and heart had by now come over me…My pacifism of the previous year had evaporated; I was becoming rather bellicose – at least as bloody-minded as every other Englishman felt towards the swaggering, bullying Germans.’

Townsend also noticed that the imminence of danger broke down whatever barriers remained between the new and the old RAF inside 43 Squadron, so that ‘in the growingly tense atmosphere, I was discovering that those parvenu pilots I had once so resented were really the warmest, most generous friends…genuine ‘fighter boys’, who lived for the shining hour, who did not take themselves seriously.’²¹

The attitude cultivated by fighter pilots from the first days on the Western Front had been hedonistic, light-hearted, little concerned with events outside their world. This was to some extent genuine, to some extent affectation. Nobody now could be indifferent to what was happening in Europe. A number of the pilots had first-hand knowledge of the rise of fascism from time spent on the Continent. James Sanders, who was brought up in Italy, had once at the age of nine sung, with the school choir, the slaves’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco in front of Mussolini himself. This encounter had induced no sentiments of respect. Later he got into trouble at school for using squares of newspaper, bearing the Duce’s photograph, as lavatory paper. Billy Drake had been sent by his father, first to a German-speaking, then to a French-speaking school in Switzerland in preparation for a career in the hotel business. In the first establishment, ‘I was the only English boy and all my classmates were Germans or Italians. I got a bit fed up with their sniping at the British Empire all the time. I spoke to the housemaster and told him what was happening and told him I intended to challenge them to a boxing bout every time it happened with him as the referee. And so I was knocked down about twelve times.’²²

Pat Hancock was sixteen when, in 1935, he went to stay with a family near Hanover and attended the local school. ‘I saw enough of the German youth movement to know how strictly disciplined they were and how confident they were that they had a great role to play in the world.’ In the streets of Hanover he saw formations of troops marching everywhere. ‘They were cock of the walk…everything glistened. I thought, my goodness, these are people who are going to have a go, given an opportunity.’²³

During an air tour of Europe in the spring of 1935 Jeffrey Quill had stopped at Berlin. He wrote to his mother that he had arrived at Templehof ‘in the middle of a sort of Hendon Air Display – they shot red lights at us to stop us landing but I was hanged if I was going to float round the sky waiting for their air display to finish, so I landed in the middle of it. They were a bit annoyed at first, but as I couldn’t understand what they were saying I just laughed and they soon quietened down. They are much too serious up here.’²⁴

Tony Bartley decided to visit Germany after being told by the captain of his rugby team, an RAF officer, that war was inevitable. After leaving Stowe school he had joined a City accounting firm to learn the profession, but left after a year. What he saw in the Reich impressed him profoundly. In Frankfurt-on-Main, staying with acquaintances of his parents, he came across a middle-aged man with a shaven head in the city’s botanical gardens. He learned he was a distinguished Jew who had just been released from a concentration camp. He told him of his experiences and invited him home to meet his family. When Bartley informed his hosts, they were horrified and told him to sever the new friendship or return to Britain. When he asked for a reason, he was told that ‘their son, a Hitler Youth, would denounce his father to the Gestapo for harbouring a Jew fraternizer’.²⁵

Ben Bowring, who joined 600 Auxiliary Squadron in 1938, met Germans in Switzerland, where he was at school, and in America, where his father travelled for business, and later through friends in Britain. He ‘absolutely loathed them. I knew them socially and they were always asking me to fly over to Germany and one thing and another. I knew perfectly well by their attitude that they were a very cruel type of people…[They] had quick tempers and they thought they were masters of everything. Since I was something of an athlete, if I beat them at a game they were quite upset and quite likely they wouldn’t talk to you for a day or so. Or else if you beat them very badly they would come cringing to you on their knees (like) bullies, having been very unpleasant to you beforehand.’²⁶

The same unsporting tendencies were to strike Richard Hillary when he went with an Oxford boat crew to compete in Germany in July 1938 in the ‘General Goering Prize Fours’ at Bad Ems. The team’s attitude to the race appeared languid, an approach which annoyed their hosts.

Shortly before the race we walked down to the changing-rooms to get ready. All five German crews were lying flat on their backs on mattresses, great brown stupid-looking giants, taking deep breaths. It was all very impressive. I was getting out of my shirt when one of them came up and spoke to me, or rather harangued me, for I had no chance to say anything. He had been watching us, he said, and could only come to the conclusion that we were thoroughly representative of a decadent race. No German crew would dream of appearing so lackadaisical if rowing in England: they would train and they would win. Losing this race might not appear very important to us, but I could rest assured that the German people would not fail to notice and learn from our defeat.

The Oxford crew won, by two fifths of a second, and took home the cup, a gold shell-case mounted with a German eagle. ‘It was certainly an unpopular win,’ Hillary wrote afterwards. ‘Had we shown any enthusiasm or given any impression that we had trained they would have tolerated it, but as it was they showed merely a sullen resentment.’²⁷

Hillary subsequently saw the race as a metaphor for the coming conflict, a ‘surprisingly accurate pointer to the course of the war. We were quite untrained, lacked any form of organization and were really quite hopelessly casual’. This was a particularly British piece of mythologizing that was some distance from the truth. Hillary was fiercely competitive on the river, and the pilots of Fighter Command would turn out to be just as aggressive as their Luftwaffe counterparts. As for training, they had prepared for the war as hard as anybody. The problem was that much of the effort had been misdirected.

It was a question of image. The Fighter Boys, like the rowers, wanted to win, and took their superiority for granted. They would rather, though, that victory was attained without too much obvious exertion. The picture was of amused, easy-going Britons triumphing over robotic Germans. It was the view the pilots had taken of themselves and it was the way they wished to be seen. This, very soon, would come to pass.

It was true, however, that deep political thinking, let alone ideological conviction, was rare among the pilots. All the services had a tradition in which political enthusiasms were regarded as both unprofessional and socially undesirable. The RAF was different in that the majority of its members, the tradesmen and technicians, were from the ambitious upper working class or lower middle class and more inclined to question authority than their counterparts in the army. Junior officers could also be vocal about decisions by higher authority, especially where life-or-death matters concerning equipment or tactics were concerned, and the general conduct of the war would later sometimes be criticised.

At Cranwell, the debating society provided a formal arena for political discussion. In November 1938 the motion was that, ‘This House considers that an agreement with Germany is in the best interests of Great Britain and of the world at large.’ It was only narrowly defeated by thirty-six to thirty-four votes, after an intervention by a cadet who pointed out that ‘the persecution of the Jews precluded any decent-minded people from having anything to do with the Germans’.²⁸

Among the squadron pilots, though, domestic and international politics and the details of each crisis appear to have excited little interest. Billy Drake and the Tangmere pilots ‘bought a newspaper to look at the sporting events, that’s all. We didn’t read it to find out what Hitler was doing. The attitude in the mess was that the war was inevitable, so why talk about it?’²⁹ Geoffrey Page’s recollection was that ‘pre-war and all through the war one never really discussed politics at all. It wasn’t an issue…Two subjects were taboo in an officers’ mess. You never talked politics and you never talked about the opposite sex.’ The first prohibition was more strictly observed than the second.³⁰

At Oxford, the University Air Squadron appears to have been gripped by the general sense of inexorability. By 1939 its members all assumed they were going to have to fight, despite the continuing optimistic noises being made by Chamberlain and his supporters. Individual political beliefs, where they were held at all, had become irrelevant. Richard Hillary was contemptuous of his bourgeois left-wing contemporaries and impressed but unconvinced by heartfelt pacifists. He and his contemporaries were perceived, he wrote, as superficially ‘selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we could lose ourselves’. The war, by offering up an unmistakable and worthwhile enemy, had provided it. Now they had ‘the opportunity to demonstrate in action our dislike of organized emotion and patriotism, the opportunity to prove to ourselves and the world that our effete veneer was not as deep as our dislike of interference, the opportunity to prove that, undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth’.³¹

These were more complex sentiments than were felt by most of the pilots. Stephen Beaumont, notably decent and intelligent, was probably nearer the feelings of the majority when he reflected on the motives that had pushed himself and his upper middle class Yorkshire comrades to join the auxiliaries. ‘Old-fashioned patriotism? Desire to give back to the community something for their – at least in some cases – admittedly favoured social background? Dismay, turning to acute dislike even hatred of the bullying they came to see in Germany? A desire to fly? Probably all these things.’³²

The overseas pilots were moved by a simple sense of duty that must have seemed slightly anachronistic even in 1939. Asked later what he had been fighting for, Al Deere replied: ‘In my generation, as schoolboys, we always thought of [Britain] as the home country, always referred to it as the Mother Country. That was the old colonial tie…There was no question that if this country was threatened, New Zealanders wouldn’t go to war for Britain.’³³ It was the same for Adolph ‘Sailor’ Malan, a South African ex-merchant navy officer who settled in Britain in 1935 and applied for a short-service commission. Malan’s voyages with the Union Castle line had taken him to Hamburg, where he ‘spent a lot of time talking to German harbour officials, sailors and civilians. Their attitude made me realize that war was inevitable.’³⁴

The pilots were joined by men who had no strong bonds natural with Britain, such as Billy Fiske, an upper-class American sportsman, captain of the US Olympic bobsled team, who volunteered two weeks after the outbreak of war. Several recruits came from Ireland. The fact that Eire was officially neutral and just emerging from a bitter independence struggle with Britain had made no difference to ‘Paddy’ Finucane, whose father had taken part in the 1916 Easter Rising, nor to John Ignatius ‘Killy’ Kilmartin, black-haired and sleekly handsome, who was to fight almost from the first day of the war to the last.

Acceptance, resignation, a certain thrilled apprehension seem to have been the predominant attitudes and emotions as the last days of peace slipped away. Not everyone answered the call of duty. In 609 Squadron one pilot decided to defect. He was, Stephen Beaumont recalled, ‘not a particularly attractive man…We felt no loss at his going.’ The squadron structure and the overwhelming importance of esprit meant that only the dedicated were welcome.

At Hornchurch, aircraft were now dispersed away from their hangars and along the far side of the airfield and tents put up to house the ground crews. A readiness system was introduced so that one shift of pilots was always dressed and ready to fly at short notice. It was to last until 1943 when the Luftwaffe no longer posed any serious threat to the country in daylight. Al Deere and the other pilots spent summer days stripped to the waist, filling sandbags to build the walls of U-shaped blast-protection pens that shielded their Spitfires. At Tangmere 1 Squadron and 43 Squadron skimmed their Hurricanes over the Channel waves, firing at splash targets with volleys from their Brownings that kicked up jagged white plumes and churned the water. The effect seemed devastating to old-timers brought up on the spindly fire-power of a single Lewis gun. ‘The noise is not so much a rat-a-tat as a continuous jarring explosion,’ wrote an RFC veteran.³⁵ By night they climbed into the Sussex skies, suspended between the stars and the street lighting that provided bearings and allowed them to keep station in the pre-blackout era. On landing, the ground crews would pounce to rearm and refuel in minutes, practising the rapid turnarounds that would prove crucially important in the fighting to come.

It was not all work. Squadron Leader Lord Willoughby de Broke arrived with the other members of 605 Auxiliary Squadron at Tangmere and entertained at Tangmere Cottage, opposite the base. The pilots, Peter Townsend remembered, ‘spent wild evenings, drinking, singing, dancing to romantic tunes’, with ‘These Foolish Things’, the hit of the day, revolving eternally on the gramophone.

All around, though, the peacetime landscape was changing. The whitish aprons and parade grounds of Biggin Hill were covered in chippings in a vain attempt to disguise the station from the air. On several nights, the lights of London were extinguished in a trial to test the efficiency of the blackout. A pilot reported that the ground ‘looked like space inverted, just space with a few pinpricks of light like stars’. Barrage balloons wallowed in the air over town and suburb. The skies themselves were filled with ominous noises. In August, 200 bombers, fighters and reconnaissance aircraft appeared over London, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Oxford, where they attracted the attention of RAF fighters and searchlight units. The aircraft were French, and the exercise intended as a test of Britain’s air defences, but few could have looked up without a frisson of apprehension.

Death moved a little closer. The Oxford University Air Squadron and RAFVR summer camp at Lympne in July was overshadowed by a midair collision in which Pilot Officer David Lewis, an experienced pilot who was flying solo in a Hawker Hind, crashed into a Gipsy Moth carrying a pupil and instructor from the Kent Flying School. All three were killed. It was, the OUAS log recorded ‘the first fatal accident in the squadron since it formed’.

Accidental deaths were commonplace, however, elsewhere in the air force, as pilots stalled, spun in, or flew into ‘clouds with a hard centre’ – hills obscured by fog. On one murky night at Biggin Hill, Flying Officer Olding was sent up to report on the state of a practice blackout in the Greater London area. Soon after take-off his engine seemed to cut out, then the pilots in the mess heard an explosion. A fire tender was ordered out, but fearing it would never be able to locate the wreckage in the foul weather, Flying Officer Woolaston took off, intending to drop a magnesium flare near the crash site. A few minutes later a second explosion was heard. His Hurricane was found a hundred yards from Olding’s, having flown into the top of Tatsfield Hill.

The effect of such events could be profound, but not necessarily lasting. Brian Kingcome was ordered to go and formally identify the body of a squadron pilot who crashed near Andover. He flew down and was met by a policeman who was concerned at the effect the sight of a mangled body might have on a healthy young man. ‘The body had been quite badly battered, he warned me, and I braced myself for the worst. Gently he drew back the sheet…I looked at the broken body and felt curiously unmoved…On my way back to Hornchurch I briefly wondered whether there was not a lesson here: whether I ought to be more careful, stick more closely to the rule books…’ The mood, though, ‘was short-lived’.³⁶

The number of fatal accidents inevitably increased as the 300 m.p.h. plus monoplanes, far harder to control than the biplanes, and in need of more room to recover if a mistake was made, were fed into the squadrons. At Tangmere, one pilot slid too slowly out of a turn and crashed in front of his comrades. Another time they watched as a pilot clipped the top of a tree coming in to land and burned to death before their eyes. Afterwards, Peter Townsend recorded ‘we had our own methods of restoring our morale. In the early hours of that morning, in the mess, we mourned our lost comrade in our own peculiar way, which smacked somewhat of the ritual of primitive tribesmen. Fred Rosier took his violin and to the tune of the can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld, we danced hilariously round the mess.’³⁷

Other atavistic instincts were stirring; the impulses to marry, or at least to have sex. The pre-war RAF discouraged officers from matrimony under the age of thirty. This was partly out of parsimony, partly out of considerations of efficiency and the desire to foster a mess-centred squadron spirit. What the service needed were single men free of family responsibilities, ready to move, at virtually no notice, where and when they were needed. Pilots had to seek the permission of their commanding officers before taking a wife. Failure to secure it meant no married quarters accommodation and no allowances. As the year wore on, the number of requests multiplied. On getting engaged to his girlfriend, Annette, Pete Brothers had to appear before Group Captain Dick Grice, the Biggin Hill commandant, who, ‘fortunately…was a very charming chap. He was sitting behind a desk smoking a pipe, and he said, “You’re very young” – I was just 21 – “what if I refuse?” I said in that case it would be very difficult to send him an invitation to the wedding.’³⁸