Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop

       7 The Battle of France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      We found them among the craters. The old man lay face down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck, oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by…Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy – recognizable only by a few tattered rags,