Wings (29 page)

This outburst understandably sparked anger in the Admiralty. Churchill seemed to imply that the performance of a military organization could be measured by the number of its members who got
themselves killed. The FAA defended
its record, claiming that it was ‘a matter beyond dispute that, in proportion to its size, the Fleet Air Arm has given bigger results
than any branch of any other service’.
¹⁶
It was, however, a matter of fact that when Churchill made his stinging observation it had been
more than a year since the FAA had sunk a ship. The criticism provoked action. When it seemed that the German battleship
Tirpitz
, which had been badly damaged in a daring attack by midget
submarines in the autumn of 1943, might be ready to go to sea again, the navy pushed the FAA forward to deal with her. Throughout the middle months of 1944 large carrier forces were engaged in
laborious operations to launch Barracuda attacks on
Tirpitz
as she lay in Kaafjord in Northern Norway. The FAA aviators flew with their customary bravery, skill and determination, but the
results were disappointing. At the end of the summer the Admiralty had to admit defeat and hand the job to Bomber Command.

Much of the work of both the FAA and Coastal Command was carried out unseen and unsung. Coastal Command’s motto was ‘Constant Endeavour’ and that summed up its fate, carrying
out endless, unglamorous duties, the crucial importance of which would only be noticed if they ceased to be performed.

They flew from the first to the last day of the war, conducting over 240,000 operations of all varieties. They attacked German seaborne supply lines, in the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay and
Scandinavian waters. They flew endless photo-reconnaissance and meteorological missions. And they roamed the seas hunting U-boats, destroying 212 of them. It was all lonely and dangerous work, and
costly in machines
and men. Coastal Command lost more than 2,000 aircraft and nearly 6,000 aircrew in the course of the war.

John Slessor, who was in charge for the crucial months from February 1943 to January 1944 when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height, gave a memorable description of what was involved. It
meant ‘junior commanders and crews – hundreds of miles out in the Bay [of Biscay] or on the convoy routes, fighting the elements almost as much as the enemy, but when the tense moment
came, going in undaunted at point-blank range against heavy fire, knowing full well that if they were shot down into the cruel sea their chances of survival were slender indeed.’
¹⁷
Their reward was the heartfelt thanks of the merchant seamen, who looked up from heaving decks and felt a comforting presence amid the harshness and
perils of their existence.

Many stricken bomber crews, limping home after a night over Germany, and many a shipwrecked mariner, also had reason to be profoundly grateful to the Command’s air sea rescue squadrons,
which saved the lives of 10,663. Landing flying boats on anything but flat seas was perilous, so aircraft instead dropped rubber dinghies and supplies. Then powered lifeboats were developed that
were designed to be dropped from converted bombers by parachute. In May 1943 279 Squadron, based at Bircham Newton, King’s Lynn, had just received the new boats, which had two engines and
could carry up to a dozen men and weighed three-quarters of a ton. On 5 May, Flight Sergeant A. Mogridge and his crew were told that a Halifax had ditched 50 miles east of Spurn Head in Yorkshire.
They took off in their Vickers Warwick and ‘after about an hour’s flying we sighted another [aircraft] circling. We made for it and were able to see a large dinghy
with a number of chaps waving like the dickens.’ After a careful approach they dropped the lifeboat, whereupon the Warwick ‘rose like a balloon for about a hundred feet’. Mogridge
‘turned sharply and we watched the boat going down. The three ’chutes had opened OK and it was floating down nicely, a bit faster than a man would. It hit the water about fifteen to
twenty yards from the dinghy with a large splash . . . we were all tremendously pleased and felt on top of the world . . . the boys in the drink who had by this time climbed aboard the boat, they
seemed cheerful too.’
¹⁸

The ASR squadrons shared the same hazards as the men they were rescuing. A few weeks later Mogridge was summoned by his CO and told that a dinghy had been spotted by Coastal Command Beaufighters
a few miles north-west of the North Sea island of Borkum. As the Beaufighters were on their way to carry out a shipping strike, they could not divert. Mogridge was given the option of waiting until
dusk before attempting a rescue, but after consulting with his crew decided to risk a daylight mission when there would be a greater chance of locating the dinghy. They flew out low, but as they
approached the place where the dinghy had last been seen they saw a Dornier circling the area. They pressed on nonetheless. ‘All of us were ready for action with fingers near the gun
tits,’ he wrote. ‘We couldn’t see if they were over a dinghy and were reluctant to leave until this was established.
However, the rear gunner must have
spotted us because he started to spray us wildly. There didn’t seem to be much direction to his fire.’ Some of his shots, though, found a target. A single round pierced the rear turret,
hitting the gunner, Flight Sergeant Ted Rusby instantly.

‘This made me feel very bitter,’ wrote Mogridge. ‘Pushing the throttle open we went after the Hun. I gave him a couple of long bursts with the front guns and saw strikes on the
fuselage and engines.’ The Dornier was still firing back, though, and now ‘Mac’ the navigator had been hit in the thigh. Mogridge broke off the attack and headed for home. There
were ambulances standing by when they landed. ‘Mac’ had a nasty wound but would survive. Ted was dead from a bullet to the heart. Death was never far away, but its sting was still
painful. The intimacy of operations made brothers out of strangers. ‘We all grieved the loss of a gallant airman and a great personal friend,’ wrote Mogridge. ‘We had been
together for over a year.’
¹⁹

Wherever Britain sent soldiers, the air force went with them. In the first years of the Second World War RAF Squadrons would serve in Greece, Iraq, Kenya, Palestine, Sudan,
Singapore and points east, and, above all, in the deserts and skies of North Africa. The assets Britain and its dominions could deploy against the Axis powers were severely limited. It was
essential that they combined in the most efficient and frictionless manner. By and large, co-operation between the air force and its naval and military comrades was good. Middle East
Command’s frequent requests for more aircraft and men were often supported by the other services in the field – an unusual circumstance that caused the brass fighting the war from desks
in Whitehall to wonder what was going on.

Egypt duty could seem at times like a holiday. The main RAF depot was at Aboukir, close to sandy Mediterranean beaches and the bars and nightclubs of cosmopolitan Alexandria. It could also feel
like hell. The desert was a testing environment
in which to operate aircraft. Arthur Tedder, who would go on to lead the force, left a description of arriving at a place where
‘everything was covered with a fine, very soft yellow powder – though it did not feel soft with a thirty or forty mile an hour wind behind it. Eyes blinked and teeth gritted with the
sand. Outside one had to wear goggles and some people occasionally even used their gas masks. On one occasion I had the front mud flaps of my car literally sand-blasted down to the bare metal in
the course of an hour’s drive against the dust.’
¹

Nothing could stop the march of dust and grit. Air-cleaners for Blenheims had to be cleaned after five hours flying – a job that took three hours. Sand got into instruments and worked its
way into the propeller bearings so that the blades could not be moved to coarse-pitch when cruising. The desert sun cracked and buckled canopy perspex. The problems were multiplied by the chronic
shortage of spares.

The RAF was trying to run a long-distance campaign through tortuous supply lines. With the entry of the Italians into the war the passing of convoys through the Mediterranean became hazardous
and most reinforcements and supplies came round the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that took eight weeks. The problem of supplying aircraft was alleviated by the opening of a staging post at Takoradi
on the Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana. Airfields were laid down, hangars and workshops and accommodation blocks built, so that by the end of 1940 a first-class service was in place to speed machines
into theatre. They would arrive by ship in crates, to be reassembled, then were flown on by delivery pilots and
crews. The 3,600-mile, six-day journey took them via Lagos,
Kano, Maiduguri, Fort Lamy, Geneina and Khartoum, before ending at Aboukir. By the close of 1943 more than 5,000 aeroplanes had been sent to Egypt by the Takoradi air bridge.

The RAF’s initial enemies in North Africa were the Italians. The Regia Aeronautica looked good on paper with more than 2,000 aircraft in the region. Their Savoia-Marchetti bomber was more
effective than the Blenheim and could outpace the biplane Gladiator fighters, which were all that were available until Hurricanes began to come in from Takoradi. Some of the crews had been blooded
fighting for the Francoists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Like their earthbound brothers-in-arms, however, the hearts of the Italian aviators were not in it. On 9 December 1940
General Richard O’Connor launched Operation Compass to counter a tentative Italian offensive. Before the battle started, RAF bombers from Malta and Egypt pounded enemy airfields, destroying
many aircraft on the ground. Ports, ammunition and supply dumps, and troop formations were all targeted relentlessly as the Italian retreat collapsed into rout and mass surrenders. When the
fighting finished, the victory in the air was as complete as the success on the ground. The Italians lost fifty-eight aircraft in combat. Another ninety-one were captured intact and a staggering
1,100 damaged machines overrun during the helter-skelter advance. Henceforth the Italian air force was crippled and offered no serious threat to British operations until Italy surrendered in 1943.
The price of victory was minimal. For the period from 9 December 1940 to February 6 1941
the total losses amounted to six Hurricanes, eleven Blenheims, five Gladiators, three
Wellingtons and one Vickers Valentia cargo biplane.

With the arrival of the Germans in North Africa in early 1941 the RAF were confronted with a far more dangerous opponent. As Rommel’s forces swept away the gains of O’Connor’s
offensive, the air force – already weakened by the decision to detach squadrons to assist in the doomed attempt to keep Hitler out of Greece – fell back to Egypt.

A long pause followed, during which both sides prepared for what was expected to be the decisive encounter. In that time aeroplanes poured in through Takoradi, including American Tomahawk, then
Kittyhawk fighters. The expanding force needed a vast number of ground staff to keep it in the air. The technical nature of flying meant the RAF trailed a longer logistics ‘tail’ than
the other services, a necessity that was nonetheless a source of continual irritation to Churchill, who calculated that it took more than a thousand men to operate one squadron of sixteen
aircraft.

The ground crew airmen were mainly British. They included my father Ernest, a fitter at Aboukir, who also flew on operations ranging from spraying the local marshes with DDT to clandestine
missions landing agents on Mediterranean islands. The fliers came from everywhere that Britain had planted a flag, and beyond. There were South Africans, Rhodesians, Australians, New Zealanders and
Free French. The South Africans were to play a particularly prominent part in the Desert Air Force (as it became known), providing crews for
half the light bomber force and a
large part of the fighter strength. South Africans starred in some of the great stories of the campaign. In March 1941, as British forces were pushing the Italians out of Somaliland, No. 3
(Fighter) Squadron raided an enemy air base at Dire Dawa in Ethiopia. During the attack a Hurricane piloted by Captain
⁴
John Frost was hit and
forced-landed on the airfield. Frost jumped out and set fire to his machine. His wingman, Lieutenant Bob Kershaw, saw his predicament and brought his Hurricane down through a hail of enemy fire to
land alongside him. Frost clambered into the narrow cockpit and sat down on Kershaw’s lap. The two then took off, as rounds flashed about them, with Frost operating the joystick and rudder,
while Kershaw worked the flaps and the undercarriage lever.

After a summer of preparations the storm broke. On 18 November the Eighth Army launched Operation Crusader to relieve Tobruk. For the six weeks of the campaign the RAF had mastery of the skies.
The Desert Air Force was now commanded by a brisk, forty-six-year-old New Zealander, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham, whose nickname ‘Maori’ had somehow been mangled to
‘Mary’. Coningham was determined on an effective combination of air power and ground forces. He set up his headquarters next door to that of the army commander, his near-namesake
Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham, and their staffs messed together. Co-operation in the air matched the closeness on the ground.
Of the twenty-seven squadrons at
Coningham’s disposal, sixteen of them were fighter units – fourteen equipped with Hurricanes and Tomahawks and two with the longer-range Beaufighters. Hitherto air support for a major
ground action had been thought of as the domain of bombers. But the new generation of fighters showed they could function in much the same way as the Luftwaffe had in the Blitzkrieg, bombing and
strafing enemy troops and communications with powerful effect. By the end of the year, after some setbacks, the Eighth Army had pushed Rommel back to Agedabia (modern-day Ajdabiya) on the Gulf of
Sirte, well to the West of Tobruk. Operation Crusader was a victory – albeit not a decisive one.