Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop
the RAFVR at nineteen, had only flown fixed-pitch propeller biplanes when he was sent to join 238 Squadron at Tangmere. He was given one short trip in a single-wing Master trainer as preparation for his Spitfire debut. He ‘took off in fine pitch and promptly forgot to put it back into coarse pitch, and did a few circles round the field thinking how marvellous it was…I made a nice landing and as I taxied in I could see the CO jumping up and down like a monkey in a rage. When I got out he told me I had wrecked the thing. I hadn’t, but it was all covered in oil.’10
The Spitfire had a very long nose, which allowed the pilot virtually no forward vision when tilted on the back wheel in the taxiing position. To see ahead it was necessary to swing the aircraft from side to side. The centre of gravity was also unusually far forward, so a heavy foot on the brakes would tip the machine on to its propeller. But these, the infatuated pilots believed, were foibles not faults. The Spitfire was certainly a better aeroplane than the Hurricane and at least the equal of its German rival, the Messerschmitt 109. The former it could out-climb and out-dive. The latter it could out-turn. It was still in service in its Mark XII incarnation at the end of the war when the Hurricane had been phased out and replaced by the Typhoon. Brian Kingcome judged that ‘the Hurricane was already more or less at the peak of its operational and design potential when it first came into service…its future was strictly limited by its rugged, uncouth airframe…The Spitfire, by contrast, possessed a unique capacity for development.’11
None the less the competitive spirit that the RAF, and particularly Fighter Command, fostered meant that the Hurricane pilots were loyal to their machines, maintaining to the last that they would not have swapped them for a Spitfire if given the choice. No. 111 Squadron pilots had had to endure some mockery at the time it took them to master the new fighters and finish the 500 hours of testing. George Unwin remembered that, as soon as they could muster twelve aircraft, the first thing they did was to come down to 19 Squadron at Duxford to ‘beat up’ the aerodrome, as the RAF called the practice of flying low and fast over bases to impress their rivals – or show off to girlfriends. Once 19 Squadron was able to do so, it flew over to Northolt and returned the compliment.
The re-equipment programme went slowly, moving at the limited pace that peacetime industrial capacity allowed. By the late summer of 1938 it seemed alarmingly out of step with events. The Munich crisis of September 1938 showed how swiftly the RAF might be called upon to act, and how unprepared it was to do so. As it broke, there were just six squadrons equipped with Hurricanes, only half of which were combat-ready. No. 19 Squadron had only three Spitfires, which were armed with machine guns but lacked gunsights. The remaining sixteen operational squadrons had Gladiator, Gauntlet, Demon and Fury biplanes to oppose the sleek, modern might of the Luftwaffe.
As the crisis deepened, officers of 1 Squadron and 43 Squadron joined aircraftmen in the hangars to cover the gleaming silver paint that usually decorated the Furies – to show them to their best advantage in formation flying and aerobatics – with dismal shades of camouflage green and brown. Billy Drake and his comrades were ordered to sleep in the hangars, next to the aircraft to be at full readiness. No one knew quite what to expect. ‘I think we had an idea that they would go for us on the airfields, but nobody really seemed to have any strategy in mind – not at our level anyway.’12
At Biggin Hill, 79 Squadron was recalled from leave and on 27 September the auxiliaries of 601 Squadron were summoned to move from Hendon to the station, which had been designated their wartime base. At Hornchurch, 54, 74 and 65 Squadrons were called to immediate readiness and some pilots slept in crew rooms close to the aircraft. No. 74 Squadron had to abandon a gunnery practice camp at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire and return home, where they obliterated the squadron badges and tiger stripes adorning the fuselages of their Gauntlets and Gladiators, mixing up the paint from the colours available in the stores when the green and brown ran out. Al Deere, now with 54 Squadron, found it ‘a heartrending operation having to desecrate one’s beautiful Gladiator’. With the return of Chamberlain, waving his assurance from Hitler, the crisis fizzled out. The sigh of relief that gusted across Britain was not shared by all. ‘It is callous and wrong to say it, but when “peace in our time” was agreed, I was horribly disappointed,’ Deere admitted later.13
The likelihood of the Luftwaffe bombing Britain in the early autumn of 1938 was small, but the scare the crisis engendered was real and had the useful effect of speeding up the delivery of Hurricanes and Spitfires. The episode also blew away the last wisps of complacency that clung to the air force about what the future held. Politicians might maintain that this time Hitler could be trusted and a cataclysm had been averted rather than simply postponed. But many of the young pilots, and those who commanded them, now believed that a clash with the Luftwaffe was inevitable.
By the end of 1938 the Furies disappeared from Tangmere and Hurricanes took their place. Paul Richey arrived there in March 1939. He was in his twenty-third year and had been brought up in Switzerland, France and Albania, where his father, a veteran of the trenches, had helped to organize King Zog’s gendarmerie. He was commissioned in 1937 and already knew Tangmere from visits during training. Posted there to join No. 1 Squadron, he noted the new atmosphere.
Half the pilots in each squadron now had to be permanently available on station in case of a German attack. Gone were the carefree days when we would plunge into the cool blue sea at West Wittering and lie on the warm sand in the sun, or skim over the waters in Chichester harbour, in the squadron’s sailing dinghy, or drive down to the Old Ship at Bosham with the breeze in our hair and knock it back under the oak rafters. Our days were now spent in our Hurricanes at air drill, air firing, practice battle formations and attacks, dogfighting – and operating under ground control with the new super-secret RDF (the name then given to radar).14
It was the same for everybody. The pleasant old arrangements of no flying after 4 p.m., and weekends and Wednesday afternoons off, were dropped and the tempo of practice and training quickened. The activity was intense but lacked direction and seemed curiously disconnected from the realities of aerial warfare as had been demonstrated by the German and Italian air forces in the skies over Spain. The preparations also seemed to lack consistency, with different squadrons following different programmes. It would soon become clear that some skills vital for success and survival in the changed conditions of air fighting were miserably under-taught and in some cases ignored altogether.
Tactical training before the war was based on two premises that would turn out to be fatally mistaken once the conflict began. The first of these was that close, tight formation flying concentrated force in such a way as to make fighters both more destructive and more secure. The second was the expectation that they would be facing fleets of bombers arriving in waves, capable of defending themselves with onboard guns but unprotected by escorting fighters. The logic of the assumption was that the Luftwaffe would be confined to its German bases and its Me 109s would not have the range to accompany the bombers.
Those who survived the war complained that the RAF had a drill-hall mentality, exalting the sort of flying discipline exemplified by 19 Squadron’s aerial rope trick. There was a useful point to close formation flying. It helped groups of aeroplanes to move through cloud without colliding or losing contact with each other. But good formation drill was also seen as the basis of good tactics. Al Deere wrote later that ‘the majority of our training in a pre-war fighter squadron was directed at achieving perfection in formation with a view to ensuring the success of the flight and squadron attacks we so assiduously practised’. These were known as Fighter Area Attacks, and were numbered from one to five, depending on the fighters’ line of approach and the number of bombers. Thus, No. 1 involved a section of three or a flight of six fighters attacking one after the other a single bomber from astern. In No. 2, two or more fighters attacked a single bomber in line abreast, and No. 3 envisaged three fighters coming at a single bomber simultaneously from rear, beam, and rear quarter. It was all very theoretical and, as it turned out, of little use. But theory was all there was to go on.
‘The order to attack was always preceded