Speed Kings (39 page)

“Death when it came was not always clean and swift,” wrote Wilf Nicoll. “Many died trapped in the narrow confines of the cockpit while the fighter plunged thousands of feet before burying itself in the earth; conscious every second of the fall, struggling to release a trapped limb or jammed hood, coolly and clinically at first until realization came that there was no release and that time and height had slipped away: then, before the final impact with the earth, the final indignity of befouling themselves.” The lucky ones, Nicoll thought, were those who were killed outright in combat by enemy gunfire. Through the Battle of Britain, the average life expectancy, in flying time, of the RAF's fighter pilots was down to eighty-seven hours. To put that in perspective, back when he was training, Billy had to clock ninety hours in the air before they even granted him a license to fly solo. The hard truth was that for many of them it had become a question of “when,” not “if.”

Billy's plane was hit for the first time later on Eagle Day. The squadron had been in a dogfight with forty German fighters over the sea past Portland. He had hit four of them, and claimed two probable kills and two more badly damaged. A cannon shell caught his wing and did such damage that he had to turn and run back to Tangmere. Archie Hope and some of the other members of 601 stayed out, circling around pilots who had come down at sea so the search and rescue teams would know where to look for them. Once the boat had picked up the RAF pilots, Hope made a point of circling the downed German fliers, so that they, too, would be rescued and brought ashore.

—

T
he morning of Wednesday, August 14, brought relief. The weather was too rough for anyone to fly. 601 was released, and Billy had his second day off that month. He spent it at Chidmere with Rose, fast asleep. Hundreds of miles away, in the Schorfheide forest north of Berlin, Hermann Goering, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, called his top officers together for a conference at his country estate, Carinhall. Goering had decided to change tactics. They had tried to draw the RAF into committing all its aircraft into dogfights over the Channel, but it hadn't worked. They had tried, too, to destroy the radar stations upon which the RAF depended, but the British seemed to repair them even quicker than the Germans could knock them out. Instead, they would target the airfields themselves.

And so, on the 15th, the Germans came in greater strength than ever. They sent almost two thousand airplanes, so many that the British radar operators found it impossible to distinguish between the different formations on their screens. The front stretched from the River Tyne, right up in the northeast, around to the River Exe, down in the southwest. 601 joined up with eight squadrons in the largest wing the RAF had assembled yet. They fought out over the sea, against a formation of bombers. It was in this action that, according to 601 Squadron lore—and the official history—Billy, all his bullets gone, managed to maneuver a straggling enemy aircraft into a collision with a barrage balloon over Portsmouth and destroy it that way. It was one of seventy-two aircraft the Germans lost that day, which they came to call “Black Thursday.” But the RAF's success came at a cost, as ever. Little Bill Clyde was hit. He managed to coax his plane back to Tangmere, though it was only the control cables that kept it hanging together. Mouse Cleaver got it too. An explosive shell hit his cockpit, and the hood exploded in his face. His eyes were punctured with shreds of Perspex. He did manage to bail out of the plane before it hit the earth, but he never fought again. That night, Billy was too tired even to write in his log. He left it all blank, thinking he would fill it in when he next had the chance.

They came for Tangmere at noon on the 16th. The radar stations on the Isle of Wight had picked up a group of around a hundred aircraft at Cherbourg, heading toward Portsmouth. They were Junkers 87s. Stukas. Dive-bombers. The Germans used them for the scalpel work of precision bombing. They had been the scourge of Allied Europe since the start of the war, the shrill wail of their sirens (“Jericho trumpets”) a chilling herald of death and destruction. But for the RAF's pilots, they were easy meat. “Rats in a barrel!” 601's pilots called
them. Compared with the Hurricanes and Spitfires, Stukas were slow, and poorly armed. If anything, the British pilots had almost come to admire the bravery of the men who flew them, since they were such soft targets.

The first call came through to Tangmere from Group HQ at Uxbridge just after midday. 601 was scrambled at 12:25. When the Stukas reached the Isle of Wight, the force split into three wings. One made for Ventor, another for Portsmouth, and the last for Tangmere. The RAF fighters split too. 43 Squadron met one flight of Stukas head-on, and routed them. But 601, led that day by Archie Hope, was told to sit tight at twenty thousand feet. In all the confusion, they had one clear order, which was to hold off attacking the Stukas and to go after the fighter escort. Hope could see the Stukas clear enough, flying in diamond formation down away to his left at twelve thousand feet. They were crossing the coast at Selsey. But there were no fighters that he could see. He asked for permission to attack and was told again, “You are only to engage the Little Boys. On no account must you attack the Big Boys.” The Stukas were closing in on Tangmere now. Hope saw the first of them fall into a precipitous dive above the airfield. “To hell with it,” he told himself. He ordered his squadron into the attack. “I think the fighters were a myth,” he wrote later. “For we never saw them and neither did anyone from the other squadrons.” He was wrong. There were fighters. The combat reports from the other pilots in 601 confirm it. But then, everyone involved in the mayhem of the raid, caught in the maelstrom of bombs, bullets, and screaming planes, lived those few traumatic minutes in their own way, and afterward those who survived could only try to piece it together as best they could.

There has always been confusion about what exactly happened on August 16, and why, but one thing's for certain: 601 was too late. By the time they started their attack, the Stukas were already turning for home, and on the ground, all hell had broken loose. 601 chased the enemy out south to sea. The pilots, furious that they had been held back while their base, and their people, were bombed, wreaked terrible vengeance, each man chasing his own target. “The fighting was low, right over the airfield,” recalled Billy Clyde. “Almost every Hurricane scored a ‘kill' or a ‘damaged,'” notes the official history. “The 87s were twisting and turning all over the place,” Hope wrote, “trying to fire their front guns.” There were seventeen Stukas above Tangmere. Some reports state that 601 got fifteen of them, eight shot down, seven more damaged—such a severe toll that the Germans withdrew the Stuka from the theater soon after. Certainly three came down in the countryside around Tangmere. At the same time, the airfield
was erupting in flames. “It was a slaughter,” remembered W. G. Green, then a flight cadet at the base.

Maurice Haffenden, a fitter, was there too. He wrote about it, soon after, in a letter to his family. “I went head first down a manhole as the first bomb landed on the cookhouse. For seven minutes their 1,000-pounders were scoring direct hits and everything was swept away by machine-gun bullets. I never believed such desolation and destruction to be possible. Everything is wrecked—the hangars, the stores, the hospital, the armory, the cookhouse, the canteen—well, everything.” In the horror and panic, the minds of the men and women fixed on strange, almost incidental details. “By special permission a Lyon's ice cream fellow is allowed in the drome,” recalled Haffenden. “He always stands just outside the cookhouse on the square. He was last seen standing there guarding his tricycle, but now at the same spot is a bomb crater thirty feet deep.” One hangar had collapsed, two more were burning. The workshops, armory, and pump house were all just heaps of rubble, the central stores were a shambles, the messes were damaged, and the runway was littered with craters. Planes on the ground had exploded into twisted scrap metal. The car park had been hit, and some of the vehicles had been thrown so far by the blasts that they were entangled in the girders that supported the roof of the garage hangar. Thirteen people were dead, twenty more seriously wounded. “In the early evening,” wrote Haffenden, “they were still sorting out the bloody remnants of flesh and bones and tied them in sheets.”

In the confusion, one voice had come through loud over the radio. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” it shouted. “Aircraft on fire! I'm injured!”

It was Billy.

Little Bill Clyde remembered Billy calling out to him, “I'm hit, I've got to land.” Clyde just replied, “OK.”

When the Mayday call came in, Dr. Courtney Willey, the only medical officer at Station HQ that day, ordered two nursing orderlies, Corporal George Jones and Aircraftsman Second Class Cyril Faulkner, to take the ambulance out to the airfield to meet the wounded pilot when he landed. “Proceeding along the perimeter we suddenly saw a cloud of dust some 25 yards ahead of us,” Faulkner recalled. “We stopped and realized we were being bombed, the first salvo on to the parked aircraft causing the dust.” They drove on. Willey, meanwhile, was busy moving twelve patients out of the sick quarters into a nearby bomb shelter. He had only just done that when the sick quarters received a direct hit. The chimney breast collapsed in through the roof, and Willey was buried up to his
waist in rubble. He pulled himself out and immediately went to work setting up an emergency sick bay so he could treat the wounded. While all that was going on, Jones and Faulkner were driving through the raid to the runway. And over to the east, on the far side of the field, Billy's Hurricane appeared, low down above the trees and hedgerows. The sight of his fighter, trailing white smoke, stuck in the minds of many of the men and women at Tangmere that day—a single image that would last through the years while many others, too horrific to recall, were blacked out.

Clyde saw it. He was in the air, but he glanced down just as Billy's plane came in. He saw it touch down near the control tower, roll on almost to the end of the runway, and stop. “In all the activity,” he said later, “he didn't sound like he was in bad shape.” Clyde didn't have time to spare another thought for his friend.

John Bushby, a cadet, was also at Tangmere that day. “The rest of the day is in my mind a series of snapshots, and the clearest snapshot in my mind is the one which registered within a few seconds of the first alarm while I was still sprinting for cover,” he wrote. “Through the gap between the two hangars I saw, across the green of the airfield grass, a lone Hurricane just touching down gently but with the undercarriage still retracted, over the panoramic blue sky. It came to rest and lay there, a thin stream of smoke settling behind it.”

“Get out! Get out for Christ's sake!” Bill Littlemore, the flight mechanic from 43 Squadron, had called out when he first saw that Hurricane trailing white smoke, knowing that the plane would soon burst into flames. But Billy didn't bail out. He just flew on, toward the runway, even as the flames were licking up around his feet, burning his flesh. The Hurricane fell into a steep approach, the wheels still up. Littlemore was sure that it would explode when it hit the runway, but instead he watched as it leveled up at the last possible second and flopped down, “leaving a trail of smoke, sparks and flame in its wake,” until finally it came to a standstill, and the smoke started to billow upward. The last thing Littlemore saw before he was snapped back into the raid was “2 or 3 bods” running toward it—the nursing orderlies, Jones and Faulkner.

It wasn't long before the rest of 601 Squadron was coming in to land on the runway behind them. As Archie Hope coasted to a stop, he saw a damaged Hurricane off to one side of the runway. As squadron leader, his first thought was always for the safety of his pilots. “I taxied my aircraft across, and found two ambulance men who had lifted Fiske out of the cockpit and laid him on the grass alongside,” he said. “The aircraft was smoldering rather than burning.” He
jumped down from his plane and shouted across to ask if he could give them any help. He saw they were fumbling with the straps across Billy's shoulders. “They didn't know how to undo his parachute harness, so I showed them.” He looked down at Billy, saw that he had burns over his feet and ankles, and all the way up his legs to his knees; his hands and face, too, were blistered, black and bloody. Hope told the medic to put medicinal cream on the wounds.

Forty years later, Hope's memory of those moments had faded. He no longer trusted his own recollections. “When I saw him he was not fully conscious or making a lot of sense & I certainly didn't ask what happened,” he wrote. “I don't suppose anyone else did later.” But in another, much earlier account, only a decade after the battle, he remembered that he had spoken to Billy. “He was more or less conscious and told me that his aircraft had been damaged by return fire from the rear gunner of a Junkers 87 which he was attacking somewhere near Bognor Regis. I cannot remember whether he destroyed the aircraft or even whether he was able to lower his undercarriage before landing.” The truth of it is lost now; the stories are scrambled. But the second version, which was accepted by Cleaver, Clyde, and the other pilots in 601, is the nearest we have to an account of exactly what happened to Billy in the minutes before he made his Mayday call.

Clyde caught a glimpse of Billy's body, laid out on the runway. “The ambulance and fire tender were alongside the aircraft in a matter of seconds,” he said, “and he was lifted from the aircraft. I was some distance away and since everything necessary was being done I didn't become involved.”

Hope stayed only long enough to satisfy himself that Billy was going to be OK. Once they had loaded him into the ambulance and set off back toward the sick bay, he walked across to dispersal. “I told the rest of the squadron what had happened, and I remember saying that Billy wasn't too badly injured.”