Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945

Nos. 607 and 615 Squadrons had also gained little experience from their months at a succession of bleak fields in the Pas de Calais. No. 615 set off from Croydon to its first French base at Merville. One flight was led by James Sanders, who after leaving Italy aged nineteen in 1935, and securing a short-service commission, had risen to the rank of flight lieutenant and acquired the nickname ‘Sandy’. He had recently been transferred to the squadron after a display of high spirits landed him in trouble with Harry Broadhurst, the commander of his old unit, 111 Squadron. One September morning at Northolt, with nothing much going on, Sanders had decided to perform a particularly hazardous trick involving taking off, roaring immediately upwards into a loop, then performing a roll at the top. Unknown to him, a meeting of senior officers was taking place at the time. Such exuberance was out of kilter with the stern mood of the times. He was placed under arrest by Broadhurst, who most of the pilots liked, but whom Sanders thought ‘a wonderful pilot but an absolute sod’. Broadhurst took him to see the Air Officer Commanding 11 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Gossage, who was more sympathetic and asked him what he would like to do. Sanders mentioned France. ‘He said, right, off you go,’ Sanders recalled. ‘So I was posted to 615 Squadron, demoted from Hurricanes to Gladiators, which were twin wings, and from a regular squadron to an auxiliary.’

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With his departure there was an incident that almost altered the course of the war. Winston Churchill had gone to Croydon to see the squadron off, accompanied by his wife, Clementine. The Gladiators were escorting five transport aircraft loaded with fifty-four airmen and stores, and so had their machine-guns, one on either side of the fuselage and one under each lower wing, cocked and ready. The firing system was notoriously unstable. As Churchill inspected Sanders’s machine, Clemmie climbed into the pilot’s seat and began asking the functions of various knobs and buttons. Just as Churchill stooped to examine one of the wing-mounted machine-guns, his wife reached for the firing button. Sanders moved rapidly. ‘I got her out of the aircraft fast,’ he said. ‘It suddenly dawned on me what an idiot I’d been.’

For much of the winter 615 Squadron was based at Vitry-en-Artois. Sanders was billeted with other officers in the village in the house of an elderly women who still dressed in black in mourning for the husband she had lost in the previous war. After dinner in the mess, which the officers set up in a local hotel, ‘they would arrive back and there would be Margot with a tray with some hot bricks with some cloth wrapped round them. I’d always say, “Non, non Margot, ce n’est pas necessaire,” but she’d insist. Then at five o’clock in the morning she’d be there with a café noir.’ When he returned to see her after the war he learned she had performed the same services for the Germans, for which even-handed hospitality she was branded a collaborator by her neighbours.

The pilots found that interaction with their French counterparts tended to be more social than professional. Sandy Sanders and his comrades ‘used to go and have parties at Lille with their squadrons, then we would go to a night-club and they would produce the girls. The French were mad keen on that subject, but all we were interested in was the drinking, having a good party. You might say, “Look at that lovely blonde over there,” but that’s as far as it went. But the French, one by one, would take the girls away and we’d be left, every one of us, drinking until two or three in the morning, having a wonderful time with the French orderly officer waiting for us to finish our fun and go away.’ The squadron’s enterprising adjutant had arrived with a suitcase full of French letters, as condoms were known to British servicemen, hoping to sell them to pilots and airmen, but custom was non-existent.

The squadron passed its time training on its obsolete aircraft, carrying out ‘affiliation’ exercises with bomber squadrons and mounting patrols over the Channel. On 29 December Sanders managed to get within range of a Heinkel 111 flying very high above the sea at 26,000 feet and emptied his ammunition at it without visible result. The squadron was told on 1 January, during a visit by the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Captain H. H. Balfour, that it was likely the unit would be re-equipped with Hurricanes within a fortnight. It was not until 12 April that the first machines started to arrive, and the squadron, like 607 Squadron, had only a few weeks in which to get accustomed to them in conditions of relative calm. The transition was still in progress when the frustrations, apprehensions and scares of the phoney war finally came to an end.

As so often on the eve of a great upheaval, the preceding days passed in an unnatural atmosphere of tranquillity. Denis Wissler arrived in France on 2 May to join 85 Squadron at Sacerat. On 6 May he spent the morning sunbathing, went on patrol for one hour forty-five minutes at lunchtime and spent the rest of the day playing pontoon and Monopoly. The following day he did no flying at all and got ‘as sunburned as I have ever been before’. On 8 May, as orderly officer, he was deputed to show a visiting actress, Victoria Hopper, and a concert party over a Hurricane, and in the evening went to the show, which on ‘the whole was damn good’. On 9 May he was on patrol again when an excited controller directed them to investigate some enemy aircraft. ‘However nothing was seen and we returned home,’ he recorded despondently in his diary. ‘Nothing else happened during the day apart from some patrols and directly after dinner I went to bed.’

It was the last good rest he would get for some time. The same evening Paul Richey was walking with a French girlfriend in the evening sunshine in a park near Metz when they heard a rumbling in the distance. ‘“Les canons,” Germaine said. “Nonsense,” I tried to reassure her. “It’s only practice bombing. There are lots of ranges round here.” It was the guns all right, big ones at that: the guns on the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. We walked back towards the town in silence, thinking our own thoughts.’

7 The Battle of France (#ulink_b365c1e6-c35f-5781-a1b7-62840bac7ff3)

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

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

Peter Parrott, a twenty-year-old flying officer with 607 Squadron, was in the mess at Vitry having a cup of tea while waiting for a lorry to take him and two other pilots to the base to stand by. ‘We heard the truck pull up, a three-tonner, the usual transport. But instead of waiting with the engine running, the driver ran into the mess, which was an unheard of liberty by an airman…He said, “There are German aircraft overhead, sirs!” Then we started to hear the engines so we hurled ourselves into the truck and went up to the airfield. I didn’t stop running. I ran into the crew-room and got my kit on still running out to the aeroplane.’

(#litres_trial_promo) As he took off, a stream of Heinkels was moving over the airfield, and he set off to catch them, firing every one of his 2,250 rounds without doing any visible damage. He would fly four more sorties that day to greater effect, shooting down two Heinkels and damaging another two.

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

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

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

It was the first time he had been in action. Even immediately afterwards he found it hard to recount the incident in any detail. ‘It was,’ he said later, ‘rather like having a motor-car accident. You can’t remember what the hell happened.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The opening hours, then the whole of the French campaign, were to pass in a blur for many pilots as one sortie merged into another, day melted into day and perpetual exhaustion tinged the whole experience with the quality of a bad dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting off from Merville mapless into the dusk, Pilot Officer Mike Stephens of 3 Squadron had soon been separated from the rest of his section, and then lost. ‘We took off in whatever direction we happened to be pointing, hoping to catch the Heinkels,’ he wrote. ‘It was hopeless. There was no radar, no fighter control at all. We were wasting effort and hazarding aircraft in the hope of finding our quarry in the gathering darkness.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The official RAF daily report admitted that the fighters ‘had much too little in the way of an effective early-warning system’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the confusion of the subsequent days, that deficiency could only get worse. Nor were the Luftwaffe to make the same mistake again. On the second day, when the bomber fleets returned, they brought the Me 109s and Me 110s with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortality concentrated minds. That afternoon Paul Richey had been hurrying over to his Hurricane to intercept a big formation of bombers heading for Reims when he ran into an RAF Catholic chaplain he had met previously and liked. ‘He asked me if I wanted absolution, puffing alongside me. I confessed briefly. He asked if there were any other Catholics who might want absolution. I said, “Only old Killy in that Hurricane over there – hasn’t wanted it for ten years but you can try!” We laughed and I waved him goodbye. But confess Killy did – sitting in his cockpit with the padre standing on the wing beside him.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Richey was shot down an hour or so later, after an extended dogfight between five members of 1 Squadron and fifteen Me 110s. He baled out and landed in a wood, and after being found by some gendarmes was reunited with the squadron the following day. Five days later he was to take to his parachute again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(#litres_trial_promo) The Blenheims were equally unsuccessful and suffered heavily at the hands of the fighters and the flak. Out of the twenty-four that set out, ten were lost.

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

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

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