For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II

‘Then on 10 May the Germans invaded the Low Countries and all was feverish activity. Infantry, light tanks were ordered up immediately to beyond the frontier. We didn’t move until three days later when we were ordered up to a place overlooking Louvain. It was intended to be part of the defensive line of the River Dyle. We got the guns into position but immediately we were ordered back; we kept going backwards with various stops until we reached the town of Templeuve, just outside Lille, so we were practically back in our old country.

There was one little incident which interested me when we were moving back from Louvain to Templeuve. We were passing through Brussels and saw a most unlikely sight: there were cavalrymen, like our own Horse Guards, but with blue cloaks, blue uniforms, plumed helmets and with beautiful black horses, and not a flicker of emotion on their faces. I couldn’t decide whether they were waiting to surrender to the Germans or just waiting to see what would happen, but anyway we carried on and eventually reached our next gun position in Templeuve. It was there we had our first casualties, not very severe, but it reminded us that this was a war. We had our Command Post in what should have been a wonderful place – it was a winery with a well-stocked cellar with all of the shelves filled with all kinds of drinks, but, not being much of a drinker, I wasn’t able to take much advantage of it.

During our three days in Templeuve, I think we managed to at least frighten the Germans. From the LP [look-out post] Germans were seen digging what appeared to be gun pits. Because of the situation, ammunition was rationed and we had to get permission to fire on the Germans, but when we did we couldn’t tell whether we killed or injured any, but we do know we sent them flying.

We stayed only a few days and then we had to start moving again. This time we moved to Flers, which, again, was only a short distance from Lille. After leaving Flers we started meeting the refugees. We also benefited from two factories which had been completely abandoned and full of cigarettes and chocolate, which we didn’t feel too guilty about taking. It was on this move that the refugees and the Army were hopelessly mixed, and a British ambulance driver stopped us to find out if we could tell him where the nearest aid post was because he had a load of wounded. We couldn’t, so he just had to drive on.

We pressed on and eventually went into “harbour” [rest and recuperation] for a day, and then later that day our CO was given orders to destroy the guns and vehicles and send the men down to the beach. He was a Territorial Army Officer and not a Regular, so he had no hesitation in refusing. So he took himself off to Headquarters, probably Corps Headquarters, and said, “I’ve got a good regiment, well trained and good morale – give me something to do.” So he was ordered to take a position on the defensive line around Dunkirk, so we were ordered back to Dunkirk and eventually arrived. There again it was complete pandemonium – soldiers, some officers, French and Belgian, who had no further interest in the war, looting our vehicles; one of them stole my trousers, which had my personal diary in the pocket.

Eventually we got our orders and dug our guns in, did the necessary survey, set up the Command Post and then we just had to sit and wait, but the few days that were left had a certain interest. A French colonial cavalry troop had decided to abandon their horses in a field next to our guns. They took all their bridles, etc, unsaddled them and went off on foot. Soon as our chaps saw this, as many as could grabbed a horse, re-saddled them and rode up and down the village going to collect their meals, etc. However, I couldn’t get a horse so I got someone to teach me to ride an abandoned motorcycle. We’d been living on preserved rations until then, then our cooks found some pigs on a farm, with no farmer around, so the next two or three days we were living on pork, which was done with fresh vegetables.

There were four light tanks which had been abandoned by the French Army, so we looked inside and found that from their ammunition racks only one shell was missing; it was hard to believe it had been fired. Our position was on the rearguard, which we expected would result in our being taken prisoner, because Churchill, at the time, had said that it wouldn’t be possible to get everybody out. In many ways we were better off than the men who had been rushed down to the beach and to the port to be taken off as best they could. The road past the guns was one of the main routes down to the coast, and as time went by the troops leaving that way thinned out until they were just mostly British infantry marching down in proper military order. We also used them to give us an idea where the Germans were so that we could pick our targets.

In fact, life became quite quiet for a little while, but then the Germans found our gun position. We’d seen a plane flying overhead and after a while it went away, and then the shells started coming. It was getting a bit hot, in the dangerous sense, so we surveyed an alternative position about 300 yards away, moved the guns and started firing again. When we fired, the Germans fired back on our old position. When they did that we stopped firing and, fortunately, we were able to keep them fooled until we actually left that place. In our alternative position we found a concrete pillbox, and that housed our Command Post. We had taken in a young mother with her baby, who was in a state of hysteria every time a shell exploded, but fortunately her father was there who kept an eye on her. Her cottage had been hit by a shell, and the three of them had got away safely, but our concrete pillbox was really the only safe place for them, for which they were extremely grateful.

This went on till 1 June when orders were given from BEF Headquarters for the whole BEF to cease fire and move off down to the beach to be taken off. The orders were, artillery would cease fire at 10pm, infantry at 11pm, and between 11 and 12 there would be a small mobile force just keeping a watch. So we destroyed our guns by smashing the breech blocks with heavy hammers. That was the best we could manage, but they would have been useless after that.

Then we started making our way down to the beach carrying the guns’ dial sights – that was the other essential, not to let a dial sight from the guns fall into the Germans’ hands. As we marched down, all gunners – we were more like staggering – we heard infantry marching, marching to a light infantry pace, and it was the Guards, probably a platoon of Guards. One passed us like a shot out of a gun. As I told myself at the time, they had the energy but they hadn’t been throwing around 100-pound shells for a few days.

We got down to the beach and the sailors started coming in with lifeboats. I had to go into the water almost up to my shoulders, and I suddenly found somebody holding on to my hand. It was our signal sergeant; he was rather short and if he’d tried to stand on the seabed he would most certainly have gone right under. He couldn’t reach high enough to get hold of the gunwale of the boat, but he had some strong sailors there to lift him in. I was half in and half out when an officer decided to play the hero and ordered everybody out simply because he’d heard a big cry of “Take shelter!” from the opposite side of the boat. Actually the sailors were very rude to him and continued hauling people in on my side. That is just by the way. We got out with very little interference, shells occasionally falling on the beach, but otherwise there was little danger.

We got away on I think it must have been a minesweeper, an old ferry boat which used to operate between South Wales and Dorset; it was called the Glendower, the name of a Welsh patriot way back. The sailors hauled us aboard and put us in a room. I was in with half a dozen other men, just in what looked like an alcove with a curtain across it. Bread was handed out to everybody and then, a few minutes later, a bottle of rum was passed round. So we got away and without any unpleasant incidents, and then we landed in Harwich. The wounded were taken off first and then we were all given a good feed on the dockside.’

Meanwhile Lance Bombardier Seeney had been hopelessly cut off from the main British Expeditionary Force. He recalled that:

‘We had no idea really what was going on and we got on our trucks and wandered off towards St Nazaire and, after a few days, we eventually arrived there.

What we weren’t aware of at that time, Dunkirk had happened and it was all over and the French had already asked for an Armistice, and for two days we’d been wandering around in France, the northern parts of which the Germans really had control, but the French themselves were in such a muddle, they weren’t in a position to stop us. We continued on – where we got the petrol from I’ll never know – but we did and we eventually arrived at St Nazaire, and that had been heavily bombed early on in the piece. Much to our surprise, there was a boat pulled up in the harbour by the quay and it turned out to be the Phillip N, God bless it, a collier which was actually on its way, of all places, to Gibraltar. However, it had been stopped and turned back and asked to go into St Nazaire to pick up the remains of some British troops.

Well, I suppose there were about 100 to 150 of us. There were men from the Air Force, Army, you name it, there we were on the deck of the Phillip N, a collier, and we took off. Fortunately the weather was beautiful and, of course, once again I remember the full moon and thought, gosh, all these U-boats hanging around and there’d be the odd bomber. . . But, for some reason or another, which is so difficult to explain, this one little boat with all these men on board, with no real self-defence – except we did have some Bren guns with us and we tied them to the railings – and we did this, that and the other thing to give ourselves some sort of cover, which might have helped, but I doubt if it would have been a lot of good. However, it gave us something to do.

There was the problem of food, and somebody had the sense to toss in crates of tinned food, but mostly it was apricots; we had stewed apricots for a day or two but the biggest problem was water. One must remember it was only a small boat, probably with a crew of five or six, and it really became a problem. By the time we arrived into the Bristol Channel, they were aware that we were in trouble with the lack of water and the barrier was opened, the anti-submarine barrier, and it was opened and allowed us to continue up the Channel and we eventually arrived at Swansea late one evening. It must have been three days later – goodness knows, it was a long time.’

Pilot Officer James Hayter saw it all from the air. He remembered:

‘When the Blitz started we were doing low-level flying, low-level bombing on mainly the bridges of the River Meuse and convoys. We had big losses, we lost most of our aircraft. At the end of the collapse in France several of us were told to go to various airfields where our armament boys were, pick up our bombs and they’d re-arm us. We were told by the Adjutant, because all our senior officers had gone back to England, we were told to pick our own targets, which we did. We finished up at Nantes and I’d lost all my tail part except for the steering elevators and the rudder, which were damaged, and we asked for petrol from the French, which they refused to give us, so we took off and, as my engine cut out, we landed at Manston. We were tired and hungry and I remember saying that we thought our senior officers had let us down, and I received a ticking-off, which I felt ill-deserved.’

James Chilton Francis Hayter

Bernard Brown was another Royal Air Force pilot involved in operations over France during those fateful days:

‘During the evacuation of Dunkirk I was a Pilot Officer and I was detailed, on one occasion, to go out to Ghent in Belgium to try and find the British Army because they didn’t know where they were. So I knew about the British Army, how extremely dangerous they were, and it was necessary always to fly at least 3,000 feet above the Army, because they would like as not give one a pannier of 303 and you’d see the shells coming up and curling down behind the aeroplane – they were very bad shots. But anyway, I did find the British Army and I found the Germans too, and they were busy riding along quite happily in their trucks and they didn’t fire a shot. So that was that little episode.

Then while the Dunkirk operation was progressing, they discovered that there was a German artillery unit in a chalk pit in Calais firing at the British Army, so they decided that we should go along and drop some bombs on them. So the Squadron – I think there were about nine of us – we left from Manston in things called Hectors, that they used to use on the North West Frontier of India to keep the people there in order. Anyway we had two bombs loaded underneath the wings and on the way over across the sea I thought I’d better try the guns, which fired through the prop. I did all the necessary bits and pressed the button and there was a mighty bang, and the next moment there was petrol in my face. I had actually ruptured the main fuel tank. I released the bombs and turned what I thought was back to England – I could barely see because the petrol was burning my face. Fortunately I had my goggles on and I flew in a general westerly direction.

Eventually I saw land, and by this time the engine was nearly sort of stopping, but I switched over then to the gravity tank and as the petrol sort of drained away from the aeroplane, no more petrol was in my face and I saw this land and I saw the Heme Bay Golf Course. I was pretty good at landing an aeroplane in those days, so I popped it on to the golf course, then got the map out and found out where I was. So I turned round and away I went, took off again and landed back at Manston, which was just up the road. At a subsequent investigation, when I got back to base, they discovered that the split pin on the front of the machine-gun, which operated a gas-operated thing, had not been fitted and the piece had blown off and gone right through the side of the aeroplane and into the petrol tank, a great big hole 3 or 4 inches across. The other Hectors were all right and had come back. They thought I had been shot down.’

Bernard Walter Brown

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_68314a60-a607-5158-8f8d-2c9f261c008e)

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz (#ulink_68314a60-a607-5158-8f8d-2c9f261c008e)

‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Winston Churchill

On 1 August 1940, Hitler, finally accepting that no compromise peace was possible with Britain, ordered the destruction of the Royal Air Force as a prerequisite to the invasion of Britain. So the great air offensive started in earnest on 13 August, commencing with attacks on fighter airfields and radar installations on the South Coast. By the end of August many aerodromes had been badly damaged and the heavy loss in fighter planes had become almost unsustainable. Pilots were very tired and morale was slipping. Goering then decided to switch his main effort to day attacks on London, which gave Fighter Command the respite needed to revitalise its effort in fulfilling and expanding its defensive and offensive capabilities. From the end of October 1940 the aerial Battle for Britain could be said to have finished in Britain’s favour. Hitler’s aim of destroying the RAF had become completely unattainable. Heavy German bombing of cities, with considerable damage and disruption, continued until 16 May 1941, then the air armadas were withdrawn to the East, where Hitler had another role awaiting them. The invasion of Britain was quietly shelved.

One of those who fought in the Battle of Britain was Alan Gawith, a New Zealander, who was accepted for a short service commission with the Royal Air Force and commenced training in the United Kingdom in June 1938:

‘I managed to complete my training and was posted to a Blenheim Night Fighter Squadron when all I really wanted was to get into a Hurricane or Spitfire Squadron. It was No 23 Squadron based at Wittering Airfield, not far from Peterborough. In many ways it was a pretty leisurely and enjoyable life, but I wasn’t what I would call the least bit well trained by the time the war started. Those months of September/October 1939 were busy months for me. I was a Pilot Officer, busy all during the day for long hours on the adjutant’s job and trying to get a bit of flying in, and I had become engaged to my New Zealand girlfriend a few weeks before the war started and we decided to get married because she was caught in England and couldn’t get home again. That meant getting the Station Commander’s permission, which was quite an experience, but he granted us permission and even went through and shouted [treated] us immediately after the wedding, on 4 October 1939. My wife had got herself a job as a landgirl on a farm not far away and she carried on with that and I carried on with my work.

Alan Gawith

My work as adjutant terminated at the end of October and the flying went on, mainly searchlight co-operation at night and training, practising, getting some hours in, getting experience during the daylight. Life was pretty busy, particularly because we had to keep crews on standby every night in case of enemy activity, which didn’t start up for many, many months. We were busy expanding, forming more squadrons and, with shortage of crews and aircraft, we were doing stretches of perhaps seven, eight and nine nights consecutively on standby in the hangar or flying. Not a great deal of spare time during the day after one had caught up with a bit of sleep, eaten and so on, and I didn’t see a great deal of my wife during that time, but as the winter wore on and the weather was getting colder I felt that I couldn’t leave her struggling with milking cows twice a day in those sort of conditions, so we got digs in the village of Wansford. I was living out from then on, which meant that I missed out on the mess life, which is half of the fun of the war really, and I had the extra responsibilities. However, we got by.

Nothing much happened until, oh, we got radar, airborne radar in June 1940, which was pretty useless but still we had to practise to try and make it work. It was in June 1940, I think, that we had our first combat as a Squadron, when both Flight Commanders, Spike O’Brien and Duke Willy, had combats and managed to shoot at two enemy aircraft, not using radar but by visual sightings. Unfortunately O’Brien’s aircraft got into a spin and he tried to get his air gunner out of the aircraft with difficulty and eventually got himself free, but the gunner had met the prop on the way out and was killed. I think we lost two aircraft that night, but I think we got two enemy aircraft so we were all square. It wasn’t a very satisfactory start to the Squadron’s war.

The Battle of Britain then came on and, of course, the Day Squadrons were thoroughly occupied. We were in No 12 Group, which was the backup group for Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group, which really fought the battle in the south. Our job then became care of the convoys around the coast of Norfolk. The Day Squadrons had been doing those patrols and the enemy were raiding the convoys quite regularly, sinking ships. We used to start before dawn and I can remember many occasions when we took off in the dark and flew up into the dawn, long before it was daylight on the ground. In some convoys we would often find a ship or two sinking but no enemy in sight. We patrolled for month after month. It wasn’t dangerous, simply because we never seemed to be there when the enemy was there and we couldn’t quite understand that, but there wouldn’t have been much point in patrolling at night.

On 13 August my son was born. I’d just got my wife established back at home from the hospital with our infant, and on 11 September I got a call to say that I was to report back to the Squadron immediately. The Squadron had been posted to Forde airfield, which we’d taken over from the Royal Naval Air Service just south of Arundel on the coast of Sussex. So I had to desert my new family, leave them in the tender care of the landlord and landlady, and disappear down to the South Coast where we landed on a very small airstrip about 800 yards long with our Blenheims, which were used to longer fields.

We hadn’t been established there very long before the attacks came in from the coast. The enemy would swoop in about dusk and machine-gun the camp. We lived in wooden huts whilst there, and we’d guard our aircraft. Two or three times we had those attacks and, of course, nothing much we could do about it. We were in the front line at last; there were one or two casualties and we had one or two aircraft destroyed, and we found what it was like to be under fire. You get machine-gun fire when you’re in the mess and you sort of burrow under the carpet – it’s as simple as that. Bullets whistling through these wooden walls made one duck. However, we survived those all right.

We saw the battle going on, the day battle up above, and we knew what the base squadrons were tackling. We didn’t know a great deal more than the civilian population; we could see what was going on, and we heard from pilots who came in and our pilots who visited base squadrons nearby, Tangmere Airfield and others. We knew, as the time went on, how grim things were; Fighter Command was strained to the limit. Sir Keith Park – he wasn’t Sir Keith then – was not getting the support he needed from his friend Leigh-Mallory to the north, who insisted on holding his squadrons back until he’d got them mounted into wings of three or five squadrons. The Hun doesn’t wait for that sort of nonsense. Park’s theory was to attack every time; even if he only had three aircraft, they would get out and do their best. It’s amazing how much a single attack by a small number of aircraft diving down through a lumbering flotilla of bombers, shooting down two or three of them on the way through, is effective in diverting the attack or splitting it up, and Park never missed the opportunity. He’d get aircraft from somewhere and make sure that the Hun got some sort of reception.

Of course, we were aware that everybody’s nerves were getting frayed when the attack on the airfields was at its height. We weren’t getting the same plastering as they were getting at the sectional airfields where the Day Squadrons were. Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Manston and others were getting it all the time. It was not the actual bombing so much as the constant day and night attacks, and nobody was getting any sleep. It was the exhaustion that was wearing out the aircrew, the ground crew, the controllers, the WAAF staff, everybody. Had that gone on for another week I don’t think Fighter Command would have survived, and there was nothing to stop the enemy coming across except Fighter Command’s air supremacy. However, it’s doubtful to me whether we had air supremacy, but at least with the help of radar and the system that had been set up by Dowding in the few years before the war, and the systems like the short service commissions getting in young fellows from around the Empire, then the British, mainly British, getting them trained just before the war, that was the only reason that Britain survived, I think, the Battle of Britain. It wouldn’t have survived if Hitler hadn’t made the mistake of switching the attack away from the airfields and concentrating on London; it gave the airfields a breathing space and the aircrews, everybody, time to get a little bit of sleep and catch up and get operational again.

Then I think it was just after that, when the Huns thought they had Fighter Command finished, that late in their raid a big wing from 12 Group arrived. When the German pilots saw this, their morale suffered accordingly. By this time the enemy had started night raids on London, and there was much more enemy night activity for the night fighter squadrons, and we were often out every night patrolling, more or less, across the track of the bombers, because radar hadn’t reached the stage where it was making too many interceptions and there was more chance of combat by visual sightings. There was one night, when we were patrolling at about 20,000 feet across Southampton or that area, and there was a huge blaze in the sky, it seemed like at least 100 miles to the north, and it was a good night, and what I was watching from that distance was the blitz on Coventry – we read about it next day.

Because of that, it was decided that the Squadron should mount layer patrols from 20,000 feet down to about 12,000 feet at intervals – four aircraft at intervals of about 3,000 feet. The first pilot off was the Sergeant Pilot, I was Number Two, the Squadron Commander, who was then Squadron Leader Haycock, was Number Three, and I forget who was Number Four, but it doesn’t matter because he didn’t take off. The weather started to close in and Sergeant Dann was first and I was listening to his report about how he was in cloud at 5,000 feet, 7,000 feet, and the controller kept asking him and he kept saying he was still in cloud, and he got up to about 10,000 feet. Sergeant Dann obviously wasn’t happy, so the controller called him back to base and asked me where I was. I said I was at 10,000 feet by then and still in dense cloud; he kept me going up and reporting periodically while he tried to get Sergeant Dann down.

Meantime the Squadron Leader had taken off. He listened to the radio, and kept under the cloud, which was about 3,000 feet when we started and was down to about 1,500 feet; then the Squadron Leader decided the sensible thing was to get back on terra firma, so he landed. Then the controller was fully occupied trying to get Sergeant Dann down, but as there were hills in the region of several hundred feet not far from base, the controller couldn’t get him to come below the cloud to land. I had plenty of time to think, well, I’ve still got to land, and when I got to 17,000 feet and reported that I was still in dense cloud, no sign of the moon, he called me in also. I acknowledged and, as we were flying over the South Coast, I just pointed my nose to France and kept going until I got below the cloud.

By that time the cloud was about 600 feet, so I just kept coming in to the north. I kept a bit to the right of the airfield because I thought, well, if I get very far right I will see the White Cliffs of Dover, even on a cloudy night – in moonlight you’d see those cliffs and have time to do something about it. When the controller asked me where I was, I told him I’d made landfall to the east of base. He was still trying to get Sergeant Dann down; by this time I think he’d got him below the cloud base, so I kept heading for the base and if the weather was descending fairly rapidly I thought, well, I’m not going to muck about with the circuits when I get there – I’m going in to land. As luck would have it, Sergeant Dann got there just ahead of me, and when he was landing I was sort of coming over the eastern boundary of the airfield and Dann called out, reporting that he had landed. I didn’t wait for any acknowledgement from the controller or anything else, I said, “Get off the bloody runway because I’m right on your tail,” and I landed within half a minute probably of Dann landing. He’d moved off all right – we didn’t collide on the ground. The weather was such that one did not feel like staying up there any longer than was absolutely necessary.

Well, the patrols carried on until December 1940, when No 23 Squadron was selected to do Intruder Patrols.’

Robert Hugh Barber was serving in the Metropolitan Police Force when, in 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force:

‘Having completed my training I was sent as a Pilot Officer to Hawarden where I learned to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes and was posted to 46 Squadron at Digby; 46 Squadron was in 12 Group, and we were there till towards the end or middle of August 1940, when we moved from Digby down to the North Weald’s Wing to an airfield, one of the satellite airfields. We operated from there and, on 4 September 1940, the CO told me to be the Weaver, who watches the rear of the squadron. We set off on a flight and I could hear a lot going on on the RT, and as I went down the sun I could see it was clear, but I was suspicious, so I turned very quickly, and as I turned I saw a 109 approaching me. Before I could take much action there was a bang on the side of the plane and the plane was hit and my right leg slightly. I immediately dived and was covered with glycol, because he’d hit the glycol tank and it came out and it was all over me, hot and sticking. I lost considerable height and finally managed to sort of wipe the screen a little and see exactly where he was. I didn’t see any more of him but I’d lost a lot of height, so I decided that the only thing I could do was to bring it down with wheels up in a field somewhere.

So I looked around for a field, finally saw a field and landed the plane successfully with wheels up. Unfortunately, with no engine, the impact was very considerable and I was laid out. I don’t remember anything of that particular moment, but the next thing I remember I was getting out of the plane and a man was walking across the field towards me. This gentleman took hold of my parachute and carried it for me, and he led me over to his car and I was taken into Maldon in Essex to a lady doctor’s. She had a look at me and rested me up, but she had to leave and left me alone and, in the meantime, I phoned up North Weald and spoke to them, and they said, “Will you be all right for tomorrow?’

I said, “Well, I’m a bit shaken up but I should be OK.”

They said, “OK, we will send for you.”

So they sent an open-flap wagon down to pick me up and I bounced in this with my parachute all the way back to North Weald and was immediately taken to the MO. The MO looked at me and said, “I don’t like the look of you – I’m taking you down to St Margaret’s Hospital, Epping, right away,” and he took me to St Margaret’s, where I was immediately taken in hand. Exactly what they did I don’t quite know, but they eventually told me I had fractured three cervical vertebrae in my neck and I had broken my jaw in three places.