Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
the opening of the blitzkrieg had been in a state of exhaustion almost from the second day. ‘I have now had six hours’ sleep in forty-eight hours and haven’t washed for thirty-six hours,’ wrote Denis Wissler two days into the hostilities. ‘My God am I tired. And I am up again at 3 a.m. tomorrow.’ Pilots dozed off in mid-flight. Wissler’s squadron comrade Sergeant Sammy Allard was found asleep in the cockpit after landing one evening and it was decided to leave him there until dawn patrol next day. In the morning he was still unconscious, so he was put in an ambulance and sent to hospital. It was thirty hours before he woke up. The chaos and the influx of retreating French troops meant that beds were scarce. The pilots grabbed the precious chance of oblivion wherever it appeared, dossing down in abandoned houses, in barns alongside refugees, beneath bushes and the wings of their aeroplanes, or simply under the stars. Again and again they remarked how it seemed they had only closed their eyes minutes before they were awoken again. Sometimes it was not far from the truth, with warnings and move orders coming through at all hours, ruining the possibility of a clear stretch of undisturbed repose. Often, when they did lie down, sleep would not come easily, and when it finally descended they would be back in the cockpit, twisting, diving and shooting in a dream-replay of the day’s combats. They looked forward to sleep with sensuous yearning, noting the experience as a gourmet records a great meal. ‘I took off from Cambrai at about 7.30,’ wrote Wissler on 14 May, ‘after the best night’s sleep I have had since this business started.’
Food, by contrast, seemed unimportant. They kept going on bread, jam and bully beef, and drank in great quantities tea that the ground crews thrust into their hands as they clambered out of their cockpits. On the odd occasions when they were able to find a café that was open or not crowded out, the food tasted of nothing. No. 1 Squadron took over a café at Pleurs, next door to the Anglure airfield. ‘We all crowded in and mechanically shoved down bread, eggs and wine,’ wrote Richey. ‘It might as well have been sawdust.’ Women were even further from their minds. When the barmaid tried to flirt with Richey, he found her ‘quite pretty in a coquettish way but I could scarcely be bothered to look at a woman these days’.20
French dread mounted as the Germans pushed closer. Rumours, many of which turned out to be horribly accurate, swirled through the towns and villages, washing over soldiers and civilians alike, saturating the atmosphere in suspicion. In this humid moral climate the pilots found that their allies could be as dangerous as their enemies. German tactics in Holland, where parachute troops had been dropped in advance of the main attack to wreak havoc behind the lines, made anyone descending from the sky an object of distrust, as Billy Drake had already discovered. Now peasants and soldiers were inclined to attack any parachutist without bothering to establish his identity. Pilot Officer Pat Woods-Scawen of 85 Squadron was shot down in a dogfight with 109s in which he accounted for one Messerschmitt himself. He baled out, to be shot at twice on the way down by French troops. British soldiers could be just as edgy. Squadron Leader John Hill, who was flying his first sortie with 504 Squadron after taking over as commander, was forced to bale out and was blasted with shotgun pellets by a peasant as he approached the ground. Having convinced them he was an English airman, he was then arrested by passing British soldiers, who accused him of being a fifth columnist. When he reached into his pockets to show some identification, they opened fire, forcing him to jump into a ditch. This aroused further suspicions and he was pulled out and beaten unconscious, only being saved by the intervention of a passing French officer who knew him.
Fear of fifth columnists was rampant, apparently with some justification. When Pete Brothers first landed with 32 Squadron to fly for the day from Moorsele in Belgium, they found 615 Squadron, who had by now moved there, ‘a bit jumpy, looking over their shoulders the whole time’. That morning a sergeant had failed to turn up at readiness. ‘They’d gone to kick him out of bed and they found he was lying on his back with a knife in his chest…They didn’t know if it was a fifth columnist or a refugee come to rob him or what.’21
The punishment the German bombers had inflicted on the soldiers and civilians below made them liable to rough justice if they landed behind enemy lines. Bull Halahan came across a crashed Heinkel. He asked some French Senegalese troops what had become of the crew, and was told they had been taken off and shot. Pat Hancock, who had arrived at 1 Squadron at the start of the fighting, was in Sammy Salmon’s big Lagonda when they saw a German descending by parachute into a field near Béthienville. ‘There was a greeting committee waiting for him,’ he said. ‘They had been tilling the field and now they wanted to kill him. Sammy said, “We can’t have this, Hancock. Bloody French.” His car instantly became a tank, through the hedge he went, into the field. We picked up the German. I put my RAF cap on his head and we dispersed the French far and wide.’22
By 17 May the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, had accepted the hopelessness of the situation. He announced to his peers that he did ‘not believe that to throw in a few more squadrons whose loss might vitally weaken the fighter line at home would make the difference between victory and defeat in France’. He concluded that it would be ‘criminal’ to compromise Britain’s air defences further. Churchill agreed and two days later ordered that no more fighter squadrons leave the country whatever the need in France.23
What remained of the eight reinforcement flights prepared to withdraw, most of them with only half the aircraft they had arrived with. On 20 May the Air Component squadrons attached to the BEF began to pack up. That evening 87 Squadron set off from Lille to Merville, the thirty-minute journey taking hours because of the blackout and roads clogged with troops and refugees. Roland Beamont described a ‘great mass…all pouring westwards…pushing perambulators, bicycles loaded up with blankets and pots and pans…As we tried to get through them in clearly marked RAF vehicles there was a great deal of hostility. I think they felt that here were the British running away.’24
Dennis David flew to their new airfield to discover that ‘accommodation was nil in the village, and we…were thankful to have clean straw to sleep on in a pigsty’. As the morning passed and the traffic outside the airfield was joined by the same retreating Allied troops the squadron had seen at Lille, anxiety grew that they would never get away. All the rumours were bad ones. A young French officer told them ‘that Arras had fallen and that the Germans were advancing to the coast. Unbelievable! A battery of 75s stopped at our dispersal point and a harassed capitaine told us how Gamelin had been executed by the Paris mob and that the Germans had reached Abbeville [well to the south].’25 Orders were given for the pilots to carry out strafing attacks on German troops on the road between Cambrai and Arras until troop carriers arrived to evacuate the ground crews, when they would switch to escorting them ‘home to England’. These last words, the squadron diary noted, had a profound effect. ‘An entirely new atmosphere was noticeable immediately the officers and men read that. A mixed feeling of regret at leaving hospitable France and an unpleasant feeling that should anything happen to the troop carriers or the Hurricanes we should be left very much alone in the world.’
By the following day they were home. Dennis David, who had been shot up in a strafing run, crash-landed but was evacuated in a passenger plane. After months looking down on the plains of northern France he was struck by ‘how small and green the fields of Kent looked’. He went home to Surbiton, where his mother sent him to bed. He ‘slept without moving for thirty-six hours. She became quite concerned and actually called the doctor, who said I was completely exhausted and should just be left to sleep.’26 The sister squadron, 85, also made it back. ‘I came home last night,’ Denis Wissler scrawled in pencil in his diary. ‘Bath, bed, booze.’
Bull Halahan decided that his men had now had enough and asked permission for the longest serving pilots to withdraw. The core of the squadron, who had been in France from the first days, left together; including the Bull himself, Johnny Walker, Prosser Hanks, Killy Kilmartin, Bill Stratton, Pussy Palmer, Boy Mould and Frank Soper. Rennie