Authors: Patrick Bishop
Historians have tended to divide the Battle of Britain into three phases, with the first period characterized by attacks on shipping, the second on Fighter Command infrastructure
targets, and the third on cities and London in particular. This suggests a method and concentration in the German approach that was, in reality, quite lacking. On that day, 10 July
1940, a large German formation also bombed Swansea, damaging ships, railways, a power station and a munitions factory, and killing thirty people. Among the pilots that launched a fruitless attempt
to catch them was Wing Commander Ira Jones, Mick Mannock’s old comrade and now in charge of the training airfield at Worthy Down. He took off in a Hawker Henley, used for towing targets,
armed with only a Very signal pistol, which he discharged eloquently but uselessly at the raiders.
The biggest clash, however, was over the ‘Bread’ convoy. At 1.30 p.m. radar noticed what seemed to be a large cluster of aircraft building up over the Pas de Calais. Twenty minutes
later the sky above the convoy was crowded with hostile aircraft – nearly thirty Dornier bombers protected by sixty Me 110 twin-engined fighter bombers and Me109s. The convoy was being
shadowed by a protective patrol of only six Hurricanes from 32 Squadron. They called for help. The first to ride to the rescue were Hurricanes from 111 Squadron, who attacked the bomber formation
head-on. It was a very risky tactic, but the effect was devastating. ‘You could see the front of the aircraft crumple,’ said Flying Officer Ben Bowring of 111 Squadron. The shock tended
to cause the pilots to break formation, losing the limited mutual protection it gave, leaving individual aircraft easier prey for the fighters. ‘A head-on attack did far more to destroy the
morale of German bombers than anything else,’ said Flying Officer Brian Kingcome
of 92 Squadron. ‘It upset the poor old pilot so much that he turned tail. When he
was sitting and couldn’t see the attack, and he was protected by a nice sheet of metal behind him and he could hear his gunners firing away, he was in a much more relaxed state of mind than
when we were coming straight at him and there was nothing between himself and the guns.’
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Soon squadrons from five airfields had answered the call and a huge dogfight involving 100 aircraft developed, by far the biggest seen in the war or indeed ever. Every pilot was on his own and
co-ordination was impossible. Flying Officer Henry Ferriss arrived with 111 Squadron just as the first bombs began to plunge around the merchantmen. ‘It was a thrilling sight I must
confess,’ he told a BBC Radio interviewer. ‘I looked down on the tiny ships below and saw two long lines of broken water where the first bombs had fallen.’
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Ferris led his flight in an attack on the second wave of Dorniers. ‘We went screaming down and pumped lead into our targets. We shook them up quite a
bit.’
As the formation split up he latched onto an Me 109 that was heading for home, chasing it far out to sea. It was a dangerous thing to do, inviting the possibility of being ‘bounced’
from above by an unseen enemy and with very little chance of rescue if he survived the attack and managed to bail out. This day, his luck was in. The German ‘was going very fast and I had to
do 400 miles an hour to catch him up. Then, before I could fire, he flattened out to no more than fifty feet above the sea level and went streaking for home.’ Ferriss managed to get in five
short bursts, ‘all aimed very deliberately. Suddenly the
Messerschmitt’s port wing dropped down. The starboard wing went up, and then in a flash his nose went down
and he was gone. He simply vanished into the sea.’
It was only then that Ferriss noticed a stinging sensation in his leg. He had been hit and now there were two Me109s on his tail. They followed him back to the coast, launching several attacks
and smashing his port aileron. Just before landfall they turned away and he managed to touch down safely. He was given a fresh aeroplane and took off on another sortie. Ferriss, who had been a
medical student before joining the RAF in 1937, did not survive the Battle. Five weeks later he was killed in a collision with a bomber while executing a head-on attack.
At the end of the month, Britain was winning the battle of attrition. Seventy-seven RAF aircraft had been lost of all types, and sixty-seven pilots killed. The Luftwaffe had lost 216 aircraft
and 495 aircrew. The figures were not as comforting as they seemed. The Germans, initially at least, had numbers on their side. They had their huge bomber fleet and a fighter strength that was
slightly larger than the RAF’s. Each force had its job to do. The bombers bombed. The fighters protected them. The Fighter Boys had a double duty. As well as trying to shoot down the bombers,
they had to protect themselves – and sometimes each other – from the fighters who were striving to destroy them.
In August the strain increased. The Germans switched tactics. Instead of trying to draw the enemy into battle by attacking convoys, they now concentrated on trying to blitz the bases from which
Fighter Command operated. Hitler
had given up hope of a negotiated settlement after his public ‘appeal to reason’ was rejected. Under his orders, Goering prepared
a maximum effort, a knockout assault to gain air superiority over Britain that would either force surrender or clear the way for invasion. The attack would come – after a postponement due to
bad weather – on 13 August, codenamed Adlertag, Eagle Day. The day dawned cloudy and rainy, but improvement was predicted and operations were scheduled for early afternoon. Some units never
received the order and took off anyway, bombers flying without fighters and fighters without bombers, confusing both defenders and attackers.
By mid-afternoon the confusion and the weather had cleared. At 3.30 p.m. radar spotted a huge force advancing across the Channel from the direction of Cherbourg along a forty-mile front. There
were nearly 300 aircraft, the largest formation yet seen, many of them Junkers 87 Stuka dive-bombers. Eighty Hurricanes and Spitfires from 10 Group bases rose up to meet them. The Spitfires of 609
Squadron – an Auxiliary unit drawn from the gentry of the West Riding of Yorkshire, based at Warmwell in Dorset – had plenty of time to gain the height needed for them to swoop down out
of the sun on a formation of Stukas. The dive-bombers were slow and cumbersome and weighed down with bombs, and they made easy meat for the delighted pilots. ‘Thirteen Spitfires left Warmwell
for a memorable Tea-time party over Lyme Bay and an unlucky day for the species Ju87,’ wrote Flying Officer John Dundas in his diary. ‘No less than fourteen suffered destruction or
damage.’
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The true number was five destroyed,
but the punishment inflicted on the Luftwaffe that day was heavy. They
had lost forty-five aircraft, the RAF thirteen.
Most of the British casualties were suffered by squadrons attacking the escorts. No. 238 Squadron, based at Middle Wallop, had four pilots killed in fighting two days previously. Now they lost
another two, with a third shot down and badly burned. All had been the victims of Me109s. The following day the unit was withdrawn from the battle to lick its wounds in the relative quiet of St
Eval in Cornwall. One of the surviving pilots, Sergeant Eric Bann, wrote to his parents: ‘I am afraid that our duty on the front line has told its tale on our systems. Our engagements have
been really hectic . . . we are all up and down with nerve trouble and have been sent to the rest camp . . . just Gordon Batt and I remain among the sergeants and many of our officers have
gone.’
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Bann lived until the end of September. His Hurricane was damaged in combat over Fareham. He baled out, but his parachute failed. His
friend Gordon Batt survived the war.
Morale would decide the contest. The defenders were blessed with many advantages. They had radar and, by and large, sufficient aircraft and pilots to put the boon of early warning to maximum
use. There were, for sure, periodic crises when there were shortages of men and machine. But there was an underlying strength in the system and the production lines of both fighters and pilots were
picking up speed. However, the dismal example of France had shown that equipment and numbers did not decide a battle. The crucial question was: did the pilots have the skill and the nerve to keep
going?
By now they had the skill. In air-fighting you learned fast or died. Collectively, pilots did not achieve anything like the same degree of proficiency. In any squadron
it was soon clear that there were some who had a sharper edge, whose reactions were a nanosecond quicker, whose eyesight was keener and whose determination a little stronger, which put them above
the others. A minority of pilots shot down a majority of the enemy aircraft. Most pilots shot down nothing at all. It was resolve and
esprit
that counted. The Battle of Britain proved that
the British pilots had more of it than their opponents.
They enjoyed one enormous practical and psychological benefit: they were fighting over their own territory. That meant that pilots who baled out could, if they escaped serious injury, be back in
action in days or in some cases hours. Crashed aircraft were patched up and recycled by special recovery teams. Surviving Luftwaffe aircrew, on the other hand, or downed but repairable aircraft,
were lost to the German war effort for ever.
The fact that the battle was fought was over the land they were defending also gave the pilots a huge motivational boost. The writings and recollections of those who took part are full of quiet
patriotism. In the case of the many pilots from the Dominions who took part in the battle and who had never seen the Old Country before they came to fight for it, the loyalty was to an ideal more
than a reality. This patriotic mood seemed to affect everybody. An extrovert character like Pilot Officer Crelin ‘Bogle’ Bodie of 66 Squadron grew poetical when describing his return to
Coltishall at the end of a day
in which he had shot down four Dornier 17s. ‘I flew to the coast and set course for home. Passing low over the fields and villages, rivers
and towns, I looked down at labourers working, children at play beside a big red-brick schoolhouse, a bomb crater two streets away; little black heads in the streets, turning to white blobs as they
heard my engine and looked up. I thought of workers in shops and factories, of stretcher-parties and ARP wardens. I hoped the “All Clear” had gone. I was tired. I’d done my best
for them.’
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Bodie, who was later killed in a flying accident, was writing about the events of 15 September 1940. This was subsequently taken as the point when the battle turned in Britain’s favour
– though it did not feel like that to the pilots. The Luftwaffe had spent August following the sensible course of battering Fighter Command on the ground. Six of the seven sector stations in
11 Group had been bombed almost to the point of collapse and five of the advanced airfields were severely damaged. In the air, just over 300 RAF pilots had been lost and only 260 had arrived to
replace them, and the factories were struggling to keep replacement aircraft flowing to the squadrons. This did not mean that Fighter Command was on the point of collapse. The system was strong and
even if the 11 Group stations had been knocked out there were other lines of defence to fall back on in the West and Midlands.
As it was, miraculously, the pressure lifted. On 7 September the Luftwaffe changed direction. The 11 Group bases were left alone. The target now was London. The decision was based on
Goering’s natural impatience and the belief (stubbornly
maintained, despite the evidence that the RAF was still well-stocked with aircraft) that Fighter Command was on
its last legs. That hot, sunny Saturday the Blitz began. Just before 4.45 that afternoon the sirens sounded and soon great fleets of bombers were laying waste the East End. Twenty-three squadrons
raced to catch them and an epic dogfight involving more than 1,000 aircraft developed over the city.
The raids went on all night and Londoners were at last plunged into the long-anticipated reality of aerial bombardment. For the RAF, however, the German tactical switch allowed its bases and
infrastructure to be repaired rapidly. The squadrons had been unable to inflict much damage on the raiders. Only thirty-eight enemy aircraft were shot down, while RAF losses totalled twenty-eight,
with nineteen pilots killed. As the raids continued, the defenders refined their responses. On 15 September, when the Luftwaffe attempted a repeat of the great attack of eight days before, Fighter
Command was ready and waiting. For Pilot Officer Tom ‘Ginger’ Neil, a tall, elegant twenty-one-year-old who had joined through the volunteer reserve, it was ‘a very special
day’. After a frustrating morning when he failed to shoot anything down, he and 249 Squadron were directed at a group of Dorniers flying over Maidstone on their way to London. ‘I found
myself behind a Dornier and as I was firing at it, the crew suddenly bailed out,’ he recalled. ‘I was so close behind it that as one of the bodies came out, I ducked in the aeroplane,
thinking, “My God, he’s going to hit me!”’ His interest was deflected by the swarm of German fighters who ‘set about me furiously and
I defended
myself’. Then, as he and so many other pilots were to remark, the violence suddenly evaporated. ‘You’re surrounded by aeroplanes like bees round a honey pot, and suddenly
everything is quiet and there are no aeroplanes. It happens instantaneously.’
Then ahead, only a mile away, another target appeared: a lone Dornier was heading down the Estuary. ‘It took some time for me to catch up, because it was going in a slight dive. Eventually
I caught it up and I suddenly found that a Spitfire was to my left. And thereafter it was fairly straightforward. A single aeroplane on its own, two of us. We took it in turns to fire. It went down
and down and down, out to sea, across a convoy of ships.’ Both fighters were out of ammunition. Neil thought, ‘Oh God, we’re going to lose this one, he’s going to get
home.’ They flew alongside their victim, close enough to ‘read all the letters on the cockpit and I could see the damage that had been done. And then it got slower and slower and slower
and the nose came up and up and up, and suddenly the tail hit the sea and it splashed down and I felt satisfaction, total satisfaction.’ As they flew back, ‘over the convoy, the ships
all blew their whistles’.
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