Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945

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

6 Return to the Western Front (#ulink_beec88f5-f350-5197-a6ba-79edd7c6fa58)

In Britain the Fighter Boys waited for the real battle to begin. Across the Channel a handful of pilots were getting a foretaste of what lay ahead. When, in September 1939, the British Expeditionary Force was sent to France, the air force inevitably went too. Four fighter squadrons were sent in the first week of the war to support the army and protect a small fleet of bombers, the Advanced Air Striking Force. This token deployment had been agreed earlier in the year. Dowding none the less protested, claiming he had been promised that no fighters would be sent until ‘the safety of the Home Base had been assured’. His fear, justified as it was to turn out, was that once the war started in France, the RAF would be committed to providing more and more aircraft and pilots to fight someone else’s battle, leaving the country’s air defences fatally weakened when the Germans moved on to attack Britain.

The squadrons flew off to bases that would have been familiar to their RFC predecessors. Their daily patrols took them over shell-ploughed earth, splintered forests and shattered villages that were only just recovering from four years under the hammer of war. No. 1 Squadron arrived in high spirits in Le Havre, flying low over the town in a display of exuberance that impressed both the locals and the Americans crowding the port in search of a passage home. They spent their first night in a requisitioned convent, and their first evening drinking in the Guillaume Tell, the Normandie, the Grosse Tonne and La Lune. The latter was a brothel where the carousing could go on until dawn. The following day they blew away their hangovers with a choreographed ‘beat up’ of the town, looping and rolling in tight formation at rooftop height. While waiting to move to their forward base, the pilots spent the non-flying hours of the day playing football and writing letters home, and the evenings cruising the boulevards. ‘We all felt that our first taste of service in France would probably be our last of civilization and peace for a long time and we wanted to make the best of it,’ wrote Paul Richey, who had joined the squadron six months earlier. He took the opportunity to make his peace with God. The old cure at the church of St Michel heard his confession, ‘giving me the strength and courage to face whatever was to come’.

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The No. 1 pilots had a rich variety of temperaments and backgrounds, typical of the established squadrons going into the war. The unit had served on the Western Front from 1915 and got through the interwar years without suffering disbandment or amalgamation. Its leader was P. J. H. ‘Bull’ Halahan, whose Irish father had been an RFC pilot. His flight commanders were Peter ‘Johnny’ Walker from Suffolk, a member of the unit’s acrobatic team at the 1937 Hendon Air Pageant; and Peter Prosser Hanks from York, who had been with the squadron since September 1936. There was an American, Cyril Palmer, known as ‘Pussy’; a Canadian, Mark ‘Hilly’ Brown; an Australian, Leslie Clisby, who had been an RAAF cadet, and a New Zealander, Bill Stratton. There was also an Irishman, John Ignatius Kilmartin. ‘Killy’ was a romantic figure with black wavy hair and chiselled good looks who had been born in Dundalk in 1913, one of eight children of a forester. His father died when he was nine and he was dispatched to Australia under a scheme for orphans known as ‘Big Brother’. As soon as he was old enough to work, he was sent to a cattle station in New South Wales, where he lived for five years. He moved on to Shanghai, where he had an aunt, and got a job as a clerk in the Shanghai gasworks. In his spare time he rode as a jockey for Sir Victor Sassoon. Seeing an advertisement offering short-service commissions, he applied, was summoned for an interview and made his way to London via the Trans-Siberian Railway in company with a group of Sumo wrestlers heading for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

There were four sergeant pilots: Arthur ‘Taffy’ Clowes and Fred Berry, both of whom had begun their careers as aircraft apprentices in 1929 and volunteered for pilot training, and Frank Soper and Rennie Albonico. The best-known member of the squadron was to be Paul Richey, whose Fighter Pilot, based on his diaries and published in 1941, was one of the best books ever written about the experience and ethos of air fighting, and still rings with unalloyed authenticity. Richey was educated at the Institut Fisher in Switzerland and at Downside. He was intelligent and amusing and a good linguist. He was also tall, blond and strikingly good-looking. Cuthbert Orde, who had been a pilot in the RFC before he became a war artist, found him at first ‘rather quiet, shy and serious minded’, while acknowledging his enthusiasm for a party. Richey’s comparative sophistication disguised a strong humanitarian streak and an unusual ability to analyse his feelings. He sympathized with the victims of the war, whoever they might be. It was a quality he shared with Billy Drake, another middle-class Catholic boy in 1 Squadron who displayed a marked sense of decency.

By the middle of October, after several moves, the squadron settled down at an airfield near Vassincourt, perched above a canal and a railway line amid lush and watery cow pastures near Bar-le-Duc where Champagne meets Lorraine. No. 73 Squadron was based not far away at Rouvres, on the drab Woevre plain, east of the heights of Verdun. Their duties were to protect the Advanced Air Striking Force, deployed around Reims and made up of Fairey Battle and Blenheim light bombers in support of the French army holding the Maginot Line along the Franco-German frontier.

To the north were 85 and 87 Squadrons, equipped with Hurricanes, who formed the fighter element of the air component of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). They were joined on 15 November by two auxiliary squadrons, 607 (County of Durham) and 615 (County of Surrey), in response to persistent demands from the French government for British forces in France to be strengthened. They would have to make do with their Gladiators until Hurricanes arrived. The Hurricanes’ wide undercarriage made them less likely to come to grief on the rough grass airfields of northern France than the Spitfire with its narrower wheelbase. There was also a strategic reason for the decision not to send Spitfires. Dowding’s vision of a French campaign turning into an unstoppable drain on resources had made him determined not to risk his most valuable weapon in the enterprise.

The pilots of 1 Squadron were billeted in Neuville, a few miles from the airfield, a village accustomed to being washed by the tides of war, having been twice occupied by the Germans, in 1871 and 1914. The squadron flew patrols whenever the poor weather permitted. On a clear day the view from the cockpit was sublime, with the Rhine winding in the distance, beyond it the Black Forest, and way off, glittering on the far horizon, the white battlements of the Swiss Alps. As in Britain, friends were at first to prove more dangerous than enemies. Richey, mistaken for a German, was attacked by two French pilots in Morane-Saulniers, the relatively slow and underarmed standard fighter of the Armée de l’Air. Fortunately his Hurricane’s superior performance allowed him to shake them off.

On the afternoon of 30 October 1939, a gloriously sunny day, the unfamiliar drone of bombers was heard high over the airfield, sending the pilots scrambling to get airborne and give chase. Ten miles west of Toul, Pilot Officer Peter ‘Boy’ Mould, an ex-Cranwell cadet who joined the squadron in June, caught up with a Dornier 17 cruising along at 18,000 feet. Mould approached from behind, hosing the bomber nose to tail with his Brownings. The Dornier, according to the squadron operations record book, ‘appeared to have been taken by surprise as no evasive tactics were employed and no fire was encountered by PO Mould’. It caught fire immediately, plunged into a vertical dive and exploded into the French countryside. The only discernible remnants of the crew of four were five hands recovered from the wreckage, along with a mangled gun and an oxygen bottle with a bullet hole in it, which were taken off to the mess as trophies in an echo of old RFC practices. The human debris was buried with full military honours but Mould felt bad about his victory, getting very drunk that night and telling Richey: ‘I’m bloody sorry I went and looked at the wreck. What gets me down is the thought that I did it.’

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For much of the time there was little to do, apart from patrol and practice attacks on ‘enemy’ Battles. The problem, from the fighter pilots’ point of view, was not that there were too many Germans, but too few. When they did appear, usually flying high on cautious reconnaissance missions along the frontier defences, there was a rush to get at them that could produce moments of black farce. On 23 November, after weeks of fruitless patrols, bad weather and exercises, there was, for a change, plenty of activity. Between them 1 Squadron and 73 Squadron accounted for five Dorniers and a Heinkel 111. The Heinkel was heading home when it was spotted at 20,000 feet between Verdun and Metz by a section of three Hurricanes from 1 Squadron, who chased it over the German frontier. The effect of their repeated attacks was limited owing to the fact that at least eleven of the Hurricanes’ guns were frozen because of the altitude, a fault later remedied when engine heat was fed to the gunports. The last bursts, which finally brought the Heinkel down, were fired by Taffy Clowes, the ex-Halton boy who was one of the squadron’s most dogged and skilful pilots. As he was breaking away, six French Moranes rushed in, firing wildly. One of them smashed into his tail, destroying half the rudder and one of the elevators. The French pilot was forced to bale out and it was only by an extraordinary display of virtuosity that Clowes was able to nurse his machine back to Vassincourt, where he crash-landed. Richey noticed that, when he emerged from the cockpit, ‘though he was laughing he was trembling violently and couldn’t talk coherently’.

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Clowes’s experience was one of several dramas on an eventful day. Earlier Pussy Palmer had led a section from ‘A’ Flight against a Dornier, setting it on fire. The rear gunner and navigator escaped by parachute, but the pilot flew on. As Palmer drew alongside, the German throttled back, causing the Hurricane to overshoot. Then he fastened on to Palmer’s tail and opened up, hitting the aircraft thirty-four times. One round, which punctured the locker behind Palmer’s head and smashed the windscreen, would surely have killed him if he had not put his machine into a dive. With clouds of smoke issuing from the engine, he prepared to bale out, but when they dispersed, strapped himself in again and crash-landed with his wheels up. The others in the flight, Killy Kilmartin and Frank Soper, returned to the attack, and this time the Dornier went down. Miraculously the pilot seemed unharmed as he clambered out of his devastated machine, giving them a wave as they circled overhead.

The pilots were reluctant to abandon the notion that a trace of chivalry clung to the business of air fighting. That night, in a gesture the RFC would have recognized and applauded, 1 Squadron decided to honour the pilot who had fought so doggedly and well with dinner in the mess. By now he was in the hands of the French at Ste Menehould gaol, and Billy Drake, who like Richey spoke good French, was sent off to borrow him for the evening. His captors reluctantly let him go, on condition that he was accompanied by a gendarme and delivered to the citadel at Verdun when the evening was over.

His name was Arno Frankenberger, and he had been a glider pilot before the war, when he joined the Luftwaffe, volunteering for special reconnaissance duties. The pilots did their best to help him relax, removing trophies from the mess and insisting on first names. It was hard work. At first he stood up every time he was addressed by an officer. After a while he fell silent and put his head in his hands. Peter Matthews, a twenty-year-old pilot officer from Liverpool who had planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a vet, but applied for a short-service commission instead, watched what happened next. ‘He left rather hurriedly,’ he said. ‘When he came back in about five minutes’ time he was full of beans. He said, “You know, I was told by my officers that the British air force were a bunch of swine, but you’re all very nice chaps.”’

(#litres_trial_promo) In these improved spirits he boasted that the German maps of Britain were better than the ones of the German frontier the squadron had pinned up on the mess wall, and that the new variation of the Messerschmitt 109 was superior to the Hurricane.

The Hurricane pilots had yet to put this proposition to the test and would not come face to face with the Luftwaffe’s most lethal fighter until the spring of 1940. The intervening months were spent patrolling, training and learning what they could from limited experience. Pussy Palmer’s narrow escape had demonstrated the vital need for armour plating behind the pilot’s back. In front, there was a bullet-proof windscreen insisted upon by Dowding in the face of the objections of cost-conscious Air Ministry officials. The engine block also gave forward protection. The squadron put in a request for steel plates to be fitted behind the seat. Hawker’s were consulted, but again there were objections, this time on the grounds that the extra weight would upset the aeroplane’s centre of gravity and impair its flying performance. Bull Halahan was not deterred. The bomber pilots had armour. He tracked down a wrecked Battle and had the steel plating removed and fitted on a Hurricane. The squadron record book noted that ‘although this alters the flying characteristics…to some extent, it most certainly adds to the pilot’s confidence’. The benefit greatly outweighed the disadvantage. Hilly Brown, the Canadian short-service officer who at twenty-eight was one of the squadron’s most experienced pilots, was sent back to Britain with the modified aircraft and gave a demonstration of aerobatics that persuaded the Air Ministry experts to change their minds. By mid March 1940, all No. 1’s Hurricanes had been equipped, and from then on the armour was fitted as standard equipment to RAF fighters, saving many lives.

Halahan’s refusal to be baulked was characteristic. He was determined to introduce any innovation that added to the safety and efficiency of his men. Halahan was one of the first to realize that the official range at which fighter aircraft had their eight guns harmonized was misjudged and would significantly reduce their destructive power. Before the war Dowding had decided that concentrating machine-gun fire in a cone 400 yards ahead of a Hurricane or Spitfire was the most effective way of bringing down a big target like a bomber, while keeping his men at the limits of the enemy defensive fire. The decision had been taken in the innocent days when it seemed that bombers were all that Fighter Command were likely to meet. Halahan and his pilots were unconvinced. They doubted that at 400 yards .303 bullets still had the velocity to fly true and penetrate armour, or that the spread would be dense enough to destroy the target, especially if it was a small one like an Me 109. During the squadron’s annual month’s shooting practice in the spring of 1939, all the guns had therefore been quietly harmonized at 250 yards. The modification meant that pilots had to get in closer. But as events in France were to prove, it made the Hurricanes of 1 Squadron considerably more lethal than those of other squadrons shooting at the official range, and eventually the 250-yard harmonization became standard.

Another innovation was borrowed from the Luftwaffe. British fighters in France had the underside of one wing painted black and the other white, which the pilots felt made them look like flying chequer boards. German aircraft were duck-egg blue, to blend in with the sky and diminish their visibility to attackers lurking underneath. Halahan ordered the squadron machines to be painted the same colour, and this in turn was also adopted by all RAF fighters.

Contrary to his bruiser appearance, Halahan was a thoughtful officer who tried hard to divine the likely nature of the approaching battle and sought to prepare the squadron as best as he could, one evening delivering a lecture on what the war would mean for fighter pilots. He was equally concerned about the well-being of those under his command, introducing rotas to give pilots and airmen regular breaks and arranging diversions and encouraging excursions to make off-duty time as enjoyable as possible. Neuville, a cluster of utilitarian streets relieved by a few rustic half-timbered houses and presided over by a handsome Romanesque church, was welcoming enough. Pilots and airmen were treated with warmth in the houses where they lodged and durable friendships were made. The officers established their mess in the mairie. The sergeants set up an English-style pub in a café.

Paulette Regnauld, who was fourteen when the aviateurs Brittaniques arrived, remembered them as ‘polite and friendly. They mixed in well. There was a certain amount of flirting but they behaved themselves. They were generous and gave us meat and chocolate. At Christmas there was a big party at the mairie, where they chased all the pretty girls.’

(#litres_trial_promo) More than sixty years on she still retained some souvenirs. Sitting at the kitchen table in her house in the town square, she produced a postcard from an airman, William Mumford, sent from Uxbridge while on leave in February 1940. A photograph, printed in the dense monochrome of 1940 film, showed Pussy Palmer, Killy Kilmartin and several other pilots standing amiably in front of the church, smiling at the camera. The long shadows cast by the sinking winter sun throw the well-muffled silhouettes of the woman taking the picture and her female companion across the church steps. The pilots are in flying boots and sheepskin jackets. The cold is almost palpable.

Neuville, for all its friendliness, had its limitations. On days off pilots would fly up to Rouvres to meet their friends in 73 Squadron or head off to Nancy, Metz or Bar-le-Duc, where the Hôtel de Metz was their unofficial headquarters and the wife of the owner’s son, Madame Jean, welcomed them as if they were family. At Nancy the main attraction was the Roxy, described by Richey as ‘low-ceilinged with a dim, religious light. It had a bar at one end and a dance floor at the other. Round the plush-draped walls were crowded tables and comfortable chairs. The bar was invariably surrounded by a throng of British and French air force officers and “ladies of the evening”, waiting to be given a drink, a good time and anything else one could afford.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a scene that would have stirred memories for Cecil Lewis.

The winter was as cruel in northern France as in Britain. For weeks at a time snow and blanketing cloud made flying impossible. The ground was iron hard, wrecking the tail wheels of the Hurricanes as they taxied out to take-off or touched down after a patrol. The squadron worked hard whenever circumstances allowed. Sightings of enemy aircraft were occasional and usually inconclusive. The pilots found they could not climb quickly enough to reach the high-flying reconnaissance aircraft as they crawled tantalizingly across the sky 20,000 feet overhead. One problem was that their Hurricanes were fitted with early two-bladed wooden propellers. The pitch of the airscrew could not be varied to improve acceleration and achieve the optimum rate of climb the engines were capable of delivering. The problem was solved when the first machine with a three-bladed constant-speed airscrew, which automatically adjusted to the rate of revs to get the best results, was delivered in April 1940. Halahan was the first to fly it, followed by the more experienced pilots, all of whom, the squadron log recorded, ‘were greatly pleased by its superior performance’. From then on the old Hurricanes were gradually replaced by the new models, but some pilots were still flying with wooden propellers when the fighting began in earnest.

In March the weather began to improve slightly and patrolling became more intense. Two new pilots arrived at the squadron, Pilot Officer Robert Shaw and Flying Officer Harold Salmon. Shaw, from Bolton, had been one of the first to join the RAFVR and had only been called up to full-time duty at the outbreak of war. Salmon had learned to fly with the RAF in 1933 and was summoned from the reserve in September 1939. Both had done conversion courses to Hurricanes before being posted to France. Halahan was not impressed by their preparations. The record book noted: ‘It is observed that new pilots sent out from England are insufficiently trained and [sic] too few hours on type to be familiar with its limitations. They also appear to have had little or no practice on R/T [radio telephony] and to have never used oxygen. It means time taken off from squadron duties to give these pilots the necessary training for active service, and also adds to the precious aircraft hours to allow them to do non-operational flying.’ Both men were to remain with the squadron throughout the summer, with Salmon claiming an Me 110 and a probable Me 109. Shaw was less successful. In his brief life as a fighter pilot he shot nothing down. He was himself attacked by a British fighter over the Sussex coast in August and forced to land. On 3 September he failed to return from a patrol and was reported missing, one of the many unremarked young pilots among Fighter Command’s dead that year.

The pilots of 73 Squadron had seen more action than those of 1 Squadron. This was due partly to their closer proximity to the frontier, partly to a more aggressive approach that sometimes took pilots scores of miles over the German lines in defiance of standing orders. The most willing to take risks was Flying Officer Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain, a twenty-one-year-old New Zealander who had first attracted attention when he entertained the crowds at the 1938 Empire Air Day show with a particularly daring aerobatic display. In November 1939 he destroyed two Dorniers and in January 1940 won a DFC. Kain was regarded by his peers as a ‘split-arse pilot’, a term that mixed approval with concern, and his approach bordered on recklessness.

Kain soon became known to British newspaper readers through the efforts of correspondents based at Reims, who, after he had shot down five enemy aircraft by the end of March, proclaimed him the first ‘ace’ of the war. Halahan disliked this development, as did others further up the RAF chain of command. Halahan preached caution, feeling there was no point in risking precious lives and machines before the real battle started. No. 1 Squadron seldom crossed the frontier. When it did it was at high altitude, turning back in a sweep to draw any German fighters out. Halahan was also strongly against publicizing the acts of single pilots, believing it undermined squadron spirit, and he banned newspaper reporters from the base. The Air Ministry had initially seemed to welcome publicity, sending four experienced journalists to act as press officers to France, but it was soon in conflict with the special correspondents. Despite the eagerness of the hacks to produce patriotic material, officials fretted about security and imposed heavy censorship that resulted in dispatches being slashed and rewritten out of recognition. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, the commander of the British Air Forces in France, also shared the view that creating ‘aces’ was bad for the morale of ordinary squadron members. When Barratt forbade interviews with pilots and ordered that all information must be filtered through service press offices, news organizations sulked and finally withdrew their men from France.

But the newspapers had recognized that Fighter Command, whose purpose and character were still known only vaguely to the British public, was a rich potential source of stirring copy and were bent on their myth-making mission. In an aggrieved article complaining about restrictions, the Daily Express correspondent, O. D. Gallagher, wrote: ‘The young men of the RAF who have not yet spread their wings in wartime need their heroes. They’re entitled to them, and whatever the policy-makers may say on this score, they’re going to have them.’ So it came to pass, but at a time when authority had decided that the propaganda benefits of publicizing fighter pilots overwhelmed all other considerations.

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The long-awaited encounter with the Messerschmitts came, finally, at the beginning of March. Cobber Kain had the first success, downing an Me 109 on 2 March over the German lines near Saarbrucken. His aircraft was badly shot up in the fight and he was forced to crash-land near Metz. His attacker was probably Oberleutnant Werner Molders, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who was himself in the process of acquiring the status of an ace. Kain’s standing, and his at this stage rare first-hand experience of the Luftwaffe’s machines, pilots and tactics, persuaded the authorities to bring him back temporarily to Britain to lecture to pilots in training. Christopher Foxley-Norris, by then preparing to join an army cooperation squadron equipped with lethally slow Lysanders, was present when Kain gave a talk on fighter evasion. ‘At the end, somebody got up at the back and said, “You’ve told us how to evade one fighter, sir. What happens if you meet two?” To which the answer was, “Oh, most unlikely. They haven’t got many aircraft and they’re very short of fuel.”’ The next time Foxley-Norris saw the questioner he was ‘being chased around a church steeple by six 109s’.

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The Me 109 was to turn out to be the most feared aeroplane in the Luftwaffe’s line-up but that was not how it seemed in the spring of 1940. The attention of everyone in the RAF was equally focussed on by the twin-engined Me 110s, which had been designed with the dual roles of clearing the way for the Luftwaffe bomber fleets and attacking incoming enemy bombing raids. The aircraft’s boastful nickname, Zerstörer (Destroyer), and its nominal top speed of nearly 350 m.p.h. at 21,500 feet – the same as a Spitfire and slightly faster than a Hurricane – made it the subject of apprehensive fascination. Air Marshal Barratt even offered dinner in Paris to the first pilot to shoot one down.

The distinction fell, collectively, to three No. 1 Squadron pilots, who between them on 29 March destroyed three Me 110s. Johnny Walker, Bill Stratton and Taffy Clowes were ordered up in the early afternoon to patrol over Metz at 25,000 feet. Half an hour after taking off they spotted nine Me 110s cruising unconcernedly in sections of three in line astern, east of the city. Once attacked, according to the squadron record, the German machines ‘proved very manoeuvrable, doing half-rolls and diving out, coming up in stall turns’. The ensuing dogfight followed the inexorable physical rules of such engagements, with the advantage shifting from attacker to attacked and back again as they followed each other’s tails in a downward spiral that in no time brought the mêlée to a bare 2,000 feet. Walker and Stratton ran out of ammunition and returned to Vassincourt, believing they had crippled one machine, the wreckage of which was later found. Clowes meanwhile had disposed of two. After hearing their accounts, the consensus was that the Me 110s were not as fearsome as their name suggested. The record concluded: ‘As a result of this combat it may be stated that the Me 110, although very fast and manoeuvrable for a twin-engined aircraft, can easily be outmanoeuvred by a Hurricane.’ The pilots also reported that ‘it appeared that the rear gunner was incapable of returning fire whilst [the] Me 110 was in combat because of the steep turns “blacking him out” or making him too uncomfortable to take proper aim.’ Barratt kept his promise. Two days later he sent his personal aircraft to whisk the three to Paris for dinner at Maxim’s.

On the morning of their success, Paul Richey brought down the squadron’s first 109. It was a fine day with high, patchy cloud when he took off with Pussy Palmer and Peter Matthews towards Metz. Noticing puffs of smoke from French anti-aircraft fire hanging in the sky, they went to investigate and saw the pale-blue bellies of two single-engined fighters 1,000 feet overhead. As they climbed to reach them, they were attacked from behind by three other 109s that nobody had noticed. Matthews called a warning over the R/T and Palmer jammed his Hurricane into a sharp turn to the left in what was to become the standard, desperate move to escape a pursuing 109. In doing so he lost control and spun down for 12,000 feet before straightening out. Matthews also dived and turned, and as the G forces drained the blood from his head he blacked out, coming to only at 10,000 feet. Richey continued to climb in a left-hand turn. Watching his tail, he noticed an aircraft moving behind him, but was unsure whether it was friend or foe and waited to see if it opened fire. When it did, he twisted down underneath his nose. ‘As I flattened out violently,’ he wrote, ‘either he or one of the other 109s I had seen above dived on my port side and whipped past just above my cockpit. He was so close that I heard his engine and felt the air wave, and I realized that he must have lost sight of me in the manoeuvre. He pulled up in front of me, stall-turned left and dived steeply in a long, graceful swoop with me on his tail.’ The German was faster in the dive than Richey. But when Richey pulled up violently and began climbing steeply, he started to gain on him. When, eventually, he was a few hundred yards distant, he ‘let him have it. My gun button was sticking and I wasted ammunition, but he started to stream smoke. The pilot must have been hit because he took no evasive action, merely falling slowly in a vertical spiral. I was very excited and dived on top of him, using my remaining ammunition.’

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Many pilots were to feel the same rush of elation at the sight of smoke and flame or the first barely perceptible faltering of control that showed a pilot was hit. The temptation to follow the machine down to its fiery end was overwhelming. It was the same instinct that makes a boxer hover over his dazed opponent as he is counted out on the canvas. A pilot had to learn to suppress this impulse if he was to improve his chances of staying alive. By giving in to it he could lay himself bare to another enemy fighter who, unnoticed, may have fastened on to his tail during the intense seconds of combat. Sure enough, as Richey broke away, he noticed another 109 about 2,000 above him. Instead of running for it, he turned to face him. The German, either through caution or lack of ammunition, fled.

That night there was a celebration, first in the officers’ then in the sergeants’ mess. Toasts were drunk from a special bottle of rum and a ‘victory’ card signed. Before the party started, Richey ‘went across to the village church opposite the mess to say a prayer for the German pilot I had killed, before I got too boozy. The door was locked, so I knelt on the steps and prayed for him and his family and for Germany.’ In fact, as he was to discover later, his opponent had crash-landed near Saarburg and survived.

As the countryside thawed out and the days lengthened, it was clear that the Germans were stirring and the fraught boredom of the phoney war was drawing to an end. Until now Luftwaffe activity had mostly been limited to daily reconnaissance flights, with individual or small groups of Dorniers, Heinkels and Junkers 88s snooping over the Maginot defences and the Ardennes sector of the border between France and Germany. The Messerschmitts had been restricted to patrolling their own side of the frontier, only occasionally venturing into Allied air space. From April the reconnaissance missions were more frequent and grew bolder, probing deeper into France, while the fighters came in large formations of up to forty aircraft wheeling brazenly over Metz and Nancy.

The longer hours of daylight meant longer periods at readiness and the day’s patrolling now began at 6.30 a.m. when the first Hurricane slithered out across the clayey mud of the thawed-out airfield and took off towards the German lines. In two consecutive days at the beginning of April, the squadron shot down two Me 110s and two 109s. The tactics they had been taught in training were being revised or jettisoned, and new ones invented, with each new experience. One was the designation of one pilot in a section to act as lookout, criss-crossing the sky to cover all possible approaches and shouting a warning if anything was sighted. The value of the ‘weaver’, or ‘Arse-End Charlie’ as he became known, was demonstrated on 2 April when Les Clisby, Flying Officer Lorimer, Killy Kilmartin and Pussy Palmer set off after high-flying twin-engined aircraft. As they approached, Palmer, weaving at the back, noticed Me 109s above, waiting to pounce, and alerted the others in time for them to break off the pursuit and face the attackers, shooting two of them down. Palmer was not so lucky and had to bale out after his reserve petrol tank was struck and set on fire.

In mid April it seemed that the war had finally started when the squadron was moved at a few hours’ notice to a new base at Berry-au-Bac, thirty miles north-west of Reims. But after a week, during which the log noted that the ‘pilots are all fed up with the lack of activity and the long stand-by hours which seem of no avail’, they returned to Vassincourt. The first full day back, 20 April, was the busiest they had so far experienced. In one encounter, Berry and Albonico claimed a 109 each, Hanks downed a Heinkel 111 and Mould a Heinkel 112, the first time the type had been engaged. At the same time, Walker was leading Brown, Drake and Stratton on another patrol which ran into nine 109s. Walker and Brown got one each. Billy Drake opened fire on two as they made off and saw one apparently go out of control. The other he followed to the frontier and watched it crash into a hill. Killy Kilmartin had meanwhile set off in pursuit of a high-flying Ju 88 and caught up with it at 26,000 feet, the limit of its altitude. The pilot dived to shake him off, and Kilmartin’s Hurricane had a struggle to get within firing range, but eventually managed to score a hit, forcing the Ju 88 to land. It had been a good day for the squadron, the first in which almost all the pilots had seen action. Halahan noted with satisfaction that ‘all the original pilots who were with the squadron when it came to France last September, with one or two exceptions, have had combats with the enemy. It is most commendable that the squadron has worked so well and made it a squadron “show” without any publicized individuality’.

By now it was clear that the main threat from the German side came from the Me 109s. The relative merits and shortcomings of the Hurricane and Spitfire compared to the Messerschmitt was to be an eternal subject of debate among pilots on both sides, who were understandably fascinated by the machines opposing them. Like the British fighters, the Me 109 owed much to the engineering prowess of one man. This was Willy Messerschmitt, whose restless creativity was exercised on a broad range of aircraft from gliders to the first jets. In the Me 109 he attempted to wrap a light airframe around the most powerful engine it would carry. The resulting design problems were as daunting as anything faced by Camm and Mitchell. The thin wings that gave the aircraft its superior performance were inefficient when flying slow, requiring a system of slots on the leading edges to increase lift on take-off and landing. Their fragility placed severe restrictions on the way guns could be mounted. Nor were they strong enough to take the machine’s weight, a weakness which meant that the undercarriage had to be supported by the fuselage. This made for a very narrow and unstable wheelbase which was the cause of many crashes on landing. According to one estimate, 5 per cent of all Me 109s manufactured were written off in this way.

The Me 109 was smaller and frailer-looking than both its British opponents. It was shorter and sat lower on the ground. Its wingspan was only 32 feet 4 inches compared with 40 feet for the Hurricane and 36 feet 11 inches for the Spitfire. Its total wing area was 174 square feet, whereas the Hurricane’s was 258 square feet and the Spitfire’s 242 square feet. It had a top speed of 357 m.p.h., the merest shade higher than the Spitfire and perhaps 30 m.p.h. faster than the Hurricane. It carried two machine-guns mounted one on either side of the upper nose decking, each with 1,000 rounds. Each wing housed a 20 mm cannon and 60 shells.

The pilots of 1 Squadron had a chance to examine the German fighter close up when, early in May, they were summoned to Amiens to examine a machine that had been captured intact. Hilly Brown took the controls and, after a practice, mounted a mock dogfight with a Hurricane flown by Prosser Hanks. From this exhibition, the squadron log noted, ‘several facts emerged. The Hurricane is infinitely manoeuvrable at all heights and at ground level is slightly faster. The Me 109, however, is unquestionably faster at operational heights and although appearing tricky to fly and not particularly fond of the ground, possesses many fine features to offset its disadvantages.’ The report noted enviously that it had ‘an excellent view to the rear’ – something the Hurricane definitely did not possess. This sober assessment would turn out to be largely accurate. The aircraft was subsequently flown by Brown to the RAF experimental station at Boscombe Down for further testing.

The air force needed all the information it could get. The phoney war had, mercifully, given Britain the lull it needed to accelerate the manufacture of aircraft and the training of pilots, but it had provided little practical experience of modern air warfare such as the Luftwaffe had gained in Spain and Poland. Unlike 1 Squadron and 73 Squadron, the other four fighter units based in France had had little contact with the enemy. Their job was to support the BEF, which was doing nothing, and the buffer zone of Belgium lay between them and the Germans. Squadrons 85 and 87 were based at Lille-Seclin aerodrome, where they flew sector patrols in their Hurricanes. The two auxiliary squadrons, 607 and 615, which arrived in November still equipped with Gladiators, were in no position to inflict much damage on the Luftwaffe even if they had been called on to do so.

Roland Beamont joined 87 Squadron at Seclin in October after a rare moment of excitement. ‘Two days before they’d shot down their first enemy aeroplane. It was a Heinkel 111. I arrived just in time to take part in the celebrations with an Air Ministry photographer out there taking pictures of all the ground crew holding on to various parts of the Heinkel that had been sawn off it with black crosses.’ Photographs were also taken of the pilots running to their Hurricanes as if they had just been scrambled, a deception that Beamont was required to join in, even though he had never flown with the squadron. The Heinkel was the first enemy aircraft to fall in France in the Second World War and the pilot who destroyed it, Robert Voase Jeff, a twenty-six-year-old short-service commission officer, was rewarded with the Croix de Guerre by a grateful French government.

The moment soon passed. Beamont discovered that normal activity consisted of ‘endless patrols looking for enemy reconnaissance but we very seldom saw them. There was no radar to help. It was just a question of eyeballs.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not until January that he had his first brush with the enemy. The squadron had been moved to Le Touquet when appalling winter conditions made it impossible to operate from Seclin. It was a miserable day, with rain and scudding low cloud, and none of the pilots expected to be flying when a call came through from the wing operations room ordering two pilots up on an intercept. Beamont took off with John Cock, one of the Australians who had answered the call for recruits, and they were directed over their radio telephones to climb through the cloud, where they saw a ‘small speck’ a few miles ahead. Beamont ‘didn’t really know what it was. I could see it had got two engines. Streaks of grey started to come out of the back of it. It suddenly dawned on me that this was a rear gunner firing tracers…miles out of range.’ The pair finally reached the German at 19,000 feet, whereupon Beamont blacked out, the victim of inoxia or oxygen starvation, caused by the fact that the tube to his oxygen mask had disconnected. He came to, upside down and diving very fast, in time to roll upright and steer for home.