Wings (20 page)

Charlton Haw would never have become an RAF pilot under normal circumstances. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice in a lithographic works in York. As soon as he was eighteen he
applied to join the RAFVR. ‘I’d always wanted to fly, from when I was a small boy. I never wanted to do anything else, really, but I just didn’t think there would ever be a chance
for me. Until the RAFVR was formed, for a normal schoolboy it was almost impossible.’
¹¹
Haw went solo after four hours and forty minutes
instruction, when the average time was eight hours, and ended up commanding two squadrons during a long, brave and distinguished wartime career.

By the spring of 1939 there were 2,500 RAFVR pilots in training. When the war broke out, 310 had already entered Fighter Command. It was there that, at the start of the war, they would be needed
most. By the end of 1938 the rearmament effort had swung behind fighters. Though the doctrine
that ultimately it was the bomber force that mattered persisted, the speed at
which war was looming made it clear that defence, for the time being at least, was more important than attack. It was the Government not the air force that forced the change. At the time the Air
Ministry was still pressing for parity with the German bomber force. The minister in charge of defence co-operation, the dry, lawyerly Sir Thomas Inskip, stated crisply the new thinking. ‘I
cannot . . . persuade myself that the dictum of the Chief of the Air Staff that we must give the enemy as much as he gives us is a sound principle. I do not think it is a proper measure of our
strength. The German Air Force must be designed to deliver a knockout blow within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The role of our Air Force is not an early knockout blow – no one has
suggested we can accomplish that – but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.’
¹²

It was true that the bomber force was in no condition to launch a serious air offensive. But at least the process of building an air fleet capable of doing so was under way. Britain’s
ability to wage an air war at sea, on the other hand, was severely restricted, and there was no training or building programme in place to make good the deficit. RAF pilots had flown the Fleet Air
Arm’s carrier-borne aircraft and RAF technicians had kept them flying. When the service was finally handed back to the Admiralty in April 1939 these vital personnel went too, leaving the navy
with a desperate shortage of skilled men, both pilots and tradesmen. The aircraft were no compensation. The FAA went to war five months later equipped
with 232 machines, of
which only eighteen were modern Skua monoplanes.

By then, however, it was fighters that mattered most. On the warm sunny Sunday morning of 3 September 1939, the long-expected announcement finally came. Most of the pilots heard
Chamberlain’s address in the mess or clustered around portable radios rigged up at the dispersal areas, where already their aircraft stood at readiness. At Tangmere in Sussex, Peter Townsend,
a flight commander with 85 Squadron, was lounging on the grass with his pilots next to their Hurricanes when they were told that ‘the balloon goes up at 11.45’. They walked over to the
elegant mess, covered in pink creeper, and listened, drinks in hand, to the broadcast. When it ended, ‘the tension suddenly broke. The fatal step had been taken. We were at war.’ That
night they raced to the Old Ship at nearby Bosham. ‘What a party we had; at closing time, we went out into the street and fired our revolvers into the air. Windows were flung open, people
rushed from their houses, thinking the invasion had started.’
¹³

At Cranwell Tim Vigors and his fellow cadets were ordered to the anteroom to hear the broadcast. When the declaration of war came ‘a shout of excitement rose from all our throats. As one
man we rose to our feet, cheering. There was not one amongst us who would not have been bitterly disappointed if the declaration . . . had not been made.’
¹⁴

There was the same reaction in the Hull classroom where Charlton Haw and thirty other RAFVR pilots were gathered after being called up the week before. ‘A tremendous cheer
went out from all of us. We were very pleased about the whole thing. We didn’t think about the danger. We all had visions of sitting in a Spitfire the following day. And then
the disappointing thing was we were all sent home.’
¹⁵

Not everyone was so carefree. Brian Kingcome of 92 Squadron noted Chamberlain’s gloomy tone, devoid of drama or tension, ‘just this sorrowful, defeated voice going on’. He
looked around at his comrades in the Hornchurch hangar office, ‘thinking to myself, probably the whole lot of us will be dead in three weeks’.
¹⁶
As soon as the broadcast was over, the air-raid sirens in London sounded, the first of many false alarms that would add to the confusion and uncertainty of the coming days
ahead.

It would be some months before Fighter Command felt its way into the conflict. The blaring sirens did not signal the onset of an all-out aerial assault. The Luftwaffe had other
targets. Hitler was anyway reluctant to antagonize an enemy whom he hoped to neutralize by negotiation. At the fighter stations dotted among the fields and villages of south-east England the
squadrons watched and waited. Some flew off to join the small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, operating from the same Pas de Calais airfields as their RFC forbears twenty-five years
before. The excitement of the move soon dissipated and they settled down into the routine of false alarms and inactivity that was the
drôle de guerre
.

For Bomber Command there was no Phoney War. It went into action on the day war was declared and on many days thereafter. The experience of battle was a painful one: there were virtually no
successes. Instead, the crews received a succession of bruising lessons on how little they knew and how
inadequate their aircraft were to the gigantic task that had been
imagined for them.

The first raid set a pattern that was to become dismally familiar. Barely had Chamberlain’s voice faded than the men of ‘A’ Flight, 89 Squadron, based at Scampton in
Lincolnshire, were told to prepare for a raid on the North Sea port of Wilhelmshaven. The flurry of initial activity subsided as the take-off time was delayed. The men stood by their Hampden
bombers, smoking and fretting. One pilot, with a reputation for cockiness, found his ‘hands were shaking so much that I could not hold them still. All the time we wanted to rush off to the
lavatory. Most of us went four times an hour.’

Eventually, just after 6 p.m., six aircraft took off, climbed over the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, then headed out over the ridged, grey monotony of the North Sea. Their instructions were to
attack pocket battleships believed to be lying in Wilhelmshaven Harbour. If they couldn’t locate the target they had permission to bomb an ammunition dump on the shore. Under no circumstances
were they to risk hitting civilian housing or even dockyard buildings and there would be ‘serious repercussions’ if they did. Like Hitler, the British government was extremely wary of
provoking reprisals if non-combatants were killed.

As they approached what they thought was the target, the cloud clamped down to a hundred feet. They had nothing to aim at apart from the muzzle flashes from anti-aircraft batteries firing
blindly towards them through the murk. Squadron Leader Leonard Snaith, who was leading the attack, ordered
them to turn back. They jettisoned their bombs in the sea and headed
for home. The initial disappointment of the pilot whose earlier nerves had initiated so many trips to the loo gave way to the realization that this was the right decision. ‘For all we
knew,’ he wrote, ‘we were miles off our course. The gun flashes ahead might have been the Dutch Islands or they might have been Heligoland.’ They reached the Lincolnshire coast in
darkness and touched down, tired and dispirited, at 10.30 p.m. ‘What a complete mess-up,’ recorded the pilot. ‘For all the danger we went through it couldn’t be called a
raid, but we went through all the feelings.’ The remarks were made by twenty-year-old Guy Gibson who led the Dams Raid to become one of the most famous air warriors of the age.
¹
The experience of that initial, fruitless raid would be repeated thousands of times before Bomber Command approached anything like the efficiency that the
oracles of air power had prophesied.

At least Gibson and his comrades had survived. The following day twenty-nine Blenheims and Wellingtons set off for Wilhelmshaven and nearby Brunsbüttel. Some of the force managed to find
the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
and the cruiser
Emden
and to drop bombs. By extraordinary determination and some luck, a few bombs hit the
Scheer
. They bounced off.
Seven of the attacking aircraft were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire from fighters. Ten aircraft failed to locate their targets and one unloaded its bombs on the Danish town of Esbjerg, 110 miles
to the north, resulting in the death of two civilians. Twenty-four airmen were killed – the first of
the 55,573 men from Bomber Command who would lose their lives in the
next six years.

Thus were laid bare Bomber Command’s fundamental weaknesses: the primitive navigational aids available meant that aircraft faced huge problems finding their targets; when they did locate
them, they lacked the technology to deliver their bombs accurately; and if they did score a lucky strike, there was a sizeable chance the bombs would not explode. On the plus side, this and the
raids that followed demonstrated that whatever the crews lacked in equipment they were superbly endowed with courage. There was no shortage of the ‘press-on’ spirit that would sustain
the Strategic Air Offensive through the dark years that lay ahead.

The Wilhelmshaven disaster gave the planners pause. For the next few months activity was confined to ‘Nickel’ leaflet-dropping operations, reconnaissance and shipping sweeps over the
North Sea. Then on 14 December 1939 the RAF launched the biggest raid of the war so far: forty-three assorted aircraft were sent off to search for ships to bomb. A squadron of Wellingtons found a
convoy in the Schillig Roads off Wilhemshaven and spent half an hour battling with low cloud trying to get into a favourable position to attack. They were intercepted by fighters and hit by flak,
and five were shot down. Then, four days later, another biggish raid was mounted against shipping at Wilhelmshaven. Twenty-four Wellingtons were despatched. Mindful of the effectiveness of enemy
antiaircraft fire, they were told not to stray below 10,000 feet. But flak was not the problem. The radar station on the Friesian
island of Wangerooge picked up the raiders.
Messerschmitt 110 fighters were waiting in the cloudless skies when they arrived. Half the force – twelve aircraft – were shot down and forty-two men killed. Five escaped from stricken
aircraft to be made prisoners of war, an early indication of the meagre survival rates once a bomber went down. The Wellington had twin machine guns in the nose and tail turrets, firing .303
rifle-calibre bullets. They managed to shoot down two fighters. It was clear, however, that formations of bombers flying in daylight could not fend off fighter attacks. Before long almost all
operations would take place under cover of darkness.

Flying in a bomber was a very dangerous business and would be the most hazardous wartime activity open to British servicemen. Non-operational flying could be almost as lethal as facing the
enemy. Of the 202 airmen killed in bombers between the start of the war and the two disastrous Wilhelmshaven missions, ninety-nine were killed while on training or ferry flights.

By the end of the year nothing like the scenario envisaged in the RAF’s pre-war strategic blueprint had emerged. The Western Air Plans, drawn up in 1936, had as their target the factories,
oil installations, roads, railways and utilities on which the enemy’s war effort depended. Political considerations meant that the moment to execute them had not yet arrived. Thirty months
before the war Britain had moved to occupy the moral high ground in the debate over the ethics of aerial warfare. Chamberlain told the Commons that the air force would bomb only military objectives
and take every measure
to avoid civilian casualties. A few days after the war started, John Slessor, by now the RAF’s Director of Plans, had promised that
‘indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy’. Within a few years, the bombing effort would be organized to do just that.

For the moment, though, the desire to avoid killing noncombatants was sincere and attacks on land-based targets were banned. It was only when spring came and the German armies were on the move
again that the restraint crumbled, then collapsed.

The winter stasis came to an end with the occupations of Denmark and Norway in April 1940. Both Fighter and Bomber Command were thrown into Allied attempts to prevent the invasions, to no effect
and painful losses. The Hampdens could just about reach southern Norway from Britain, but as Arthur Harris noted the bomber was ‘cold meat for any determined enemy fighter in daylight’
and six were shot down in a single operation against Kristiansand on 12 April.
²