17–18 AUGUST
After six hectic and destructive days, the 17th of August surprisingly allowed both sides to ‘stand in pause’. There was no apparent reason for this. The weather was as brilliant as it had been for days past, and by mid-morning the radar operators began to suspect the efficiency of their aerials or cathode-ray tubes. At Observer Corps posts all that could be heard was the occasional sound of a communications plane, or, briefly, a Hurricane or Spitfire on engine test. Later, convoy patrols off the coast could be heard but aroused no concern.
‘Not a single sausage, scare, flap or diversion of any description today,’ wrote the CO of 32 Squadron at Biggin Hill, Mike Crossley. ‘Amazing. Heavenly day, too.’1
This unexpected hiatus allowed work to proceed unhindered on the repair of Ventnor CH station, on the clearance of hangar wreckage at Brize Norton and Tangmere especially, and the filling in of craters at several more airfields. GPO telephone technicians and RAF electricians worked to reconnect severed communications. Catering staff with damaged kitchens and messes to cope with sought to set up makeshift arrangements under canvas or commandeered buildings. In many cases, accommodation for bombed-out personnel, flying and non-flying, had to be sought in local houses – from which, by now, many residents had long since moved away. The dead were buried and the wounded moved from sick quarters to civilian hospitals.
At all levels of command, on both sides of the Channel, twenty-four hours for reflection came like a gift. No. 601 Squadron’s intelligence officer was able to complete his reports on the previous day’s activities, and the armourers of 19 Squadron were able to give time to their temperamental new cannons, which were jamming after a few rounds.
At Rosières-en-Santerre, Epinoy, Cambrai, St Trond and other French bomber airfields, Dorniers and Heinkels were serviced and battle-damage repaired. The same work was carried out at the Stukageschwader bases in Normandy and Brittany, but many new dive-bombers were flown in as replacements, and these, too, required checking over. The aircrew new arrivals were looked over, too, new names learned and wisecracks exchanged about the ‘Tommy pilots’.
(It was generally agreed that it was better to bale out or crash-land over England than over the Channel; the cage would detain you for no more than a few weeks, the sea perhaps for ever.)
All German aircrew loathed the sea and coined the word Kanalkrank, Channel sickness, for their fear, which was compounded by the certainty that the cold would kill them within four hours, although a crash-landing in the sea might give a bomber crew the chance to launch a dinghy.
Perversely, they believed that the seafaring British did not share this fear. Paddy Barthrop of 602 Squadron was not the only British pilot who wondered why the Me 109s did not carry long-range drop tanks. ‘They could have won the war,’ he claimed lightly, ‘and we would be rich and they poor.’
In fact, the Dackelbauch (‘Dachshund belly’), which had enabled the Norwegian-based Me 110s to ‘escort’ the bombers to the north-east coast two days earlier, had been developed months ago, but no single-engined fighter on either side was equipped to carry drop tanks in August 1940. This was an astonishing German failure. Drop tanks for Me 109s and He 51s had been tried out successfully in the Spanish Civil War. ‘Our range could have been extended by 125 to 200 miles,’ wrote Galland. ‘At that time this would have been just the decisive extension of our penetration.’2
Because of this intermission of 17 August, it is likely that more RAF fighter pilots read the newspapers in their messes than on busier mornings. It is also likely that they took ‘a damn poor view’ of a letter in The Times from the naval writer, Bernard Acworth. This began by praising the ‘incomparable’ fighter pilots, but then continued:
This war will be won by the relentless and pervading influence of sea power, and until the Army is ready and the opportunity available, for the administration of a second Waterloo, every effort on land and in the air should be devoted to buttressing and strengthening our sea power.
The admiration for the RAF of Churchill, twice First Lord of the Admiralty, was unconditional, and three days later he was to utter the famous claim that ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’* But not for one moment did this lead him to relax his search for greater efficiency and the destruction of corrupt and ever-growing empires in this Service, as well as the Army and Royal Navy. On the contrary, the pause in the German assault from the air seemed to impel him to write the next day of ‘local vested interests’, especially at Hendon, where ‘enormous numbers of aircraft’ seemed to be kept out of the fight for inspections and other peacetime activities.
Churchill wrote to the Secretary of State for Air:
I should have thought that Hendon could provide at least two good squadrons of fighter or bomber aircraft of the reserve category…. Then they could be thrown in when an emergency came. Ought you not every day to call in question in your mind every non-military aspect of the Air Force? The tendency of every station commander is naturally to keep as much in his hands as possible.
Churchill had a great affection for ‘Archie’, his Secretary of State for Air, the Rt Hon. Sir Archibald Sinclair, a patrician Liberal. They had fought together in the trenches in the Great War, and there are few greater loyalties than those founded in old wars. A pilot of hard-pressed 64 Squadron (Spitfires) of 11 Group recalls at the height of the Battle a visit and an inspection by Archibald Sinclair. It was not, apparently, one of Sir Archibald’s best days. ‘His opening speech started by thanking the pilots of 12 Group for the work we were doing with our Hurricanes.’3
Churchill’s minutes during this critical period of 1940 remind the reader of his concern to probe every aspect of the defence of the nation, from the development of photo-electric Shell fuses to the double-checking of civilian gas masks, from anti-tank obstacles in St James’s Park to training men to use the ‘stickybomb’ in the event of invasion.
On 28 August, Sinclair was the recipient of a minute (it could be called a ‘rocket’) from Churchill following his visit to the south-east to inspect the defences. The Prime Minister was displeased with the speed of repair to airfields, in particular Manston, where he was
much concerned to find that, although more than four clear days have passed since it was last raided, the greater part of the craters on the landing ground remain unfilled, and the aerodrome was barely serviceable…. I must protest emphatically at this feeble method of repairing damage. Altogether there were 150 people available to work…. These were doing their best. No effective appliances were available, and the whole process appeared disproportionate to the value of maintaining this fighting vantage ground.4
As was his custom, Churchill followed criticism with recommendations for a practical remedy. He called for ‘crater-filling companies’ of some 250 men each, ‘with all helpful appliances and highly mobile, so that in a few hours they can be at work on any site which has been cratered’. He also recommended that, as a refinement, camouflage efforts should be made when craters were filled ‘to pretend they had not been’.
Crater-filling of aerodromes, which generally was speedy, was important. The supply of replacement pilots was more important still and was rapidly becoming the most critical aspect of Fighter Command’s continuing defence. Between 8 and 18 August no fewer than 154 pilots had been lost, killed, missing or so gravely wounded as to be out of the Battle. During that same period the OTUs produced few more than a third of this number. They had, it transpired later, made no effort to accelerate the final training course, to pack in more flying hours per day, or increase the facilities for firing practice. It was just as if peace still prevailed, except that the extent of the course was severely shortened. Keith Park later wrote:
I was worried daily from July to September by a chronic shortage of trained fighter pilots…. In December 1940 when I was posted to Flying Training Command, I found that the flying schools were working at only 2/3rds capacity and were following peacetime routines, being quite unaware of the grave shortage of pilots in Fighter Command.5
The crisis was compounded by the quality and experience of those lost, including a large number of squadron and flight commanders, and the dangerous inexperience of those replacing them. Taking a random sample in 1988 of the many survivors who reported on their OTU training after the Battle began, the average was eleven days, which could mean six to nine hours (several of them less) in the air. ‘I fired my guns once into cloud,’ was a typical comment; and few had any air-to-air gunnery practice, or experience with the reflector gunsight.
‘I tried to take up my new pilots once or twice before taking them on ops,’ one squadron commander, James Leathart, claimed. ‘It was like sentencing them to death if I didn’t, and not far short of it even if I did. They hadn’t a clue about high-speed combat or deflection shooting or holding fire until 200 yards….’
This added responsibility was a great burden, psychological and physical, on squadron and flight commanders who were already becoming tired and stale. Many survivors looking back nearly fifty years later recalled that this mid-August period was the hardest to get through, and some remembered feeling that the RAF might not finally prevail against these unremitting attacks.
Alan Deere, never one to over-dramatise, confided that, ‘When we moved north we were really flaked out. I hardly knew what we were doing. We used to fly down to Manston [from Hornchurch], get bombed there, do two or three ops, get bombed again, then home again in the evening – when we could. Otherwise it was tents there. When we were sent up to Catterick [3 September], 54 Squadron was down to three experienced pilots, Colin Gray, a fellow New Zealander, George Gribble and me.’
The pilot crisis was eased by robbing Peter. Besides calling for volunteers from the Fleet Air Arm, Bomber and Coastal Command pilots, many just completing their training, were hastily converted to single-seat fighters. Desperate times called for desperate measures. But no one could bring back the skill and experience of Fighter Command pilots prevailing at the opening of the Battle in July. Although the structure of the Command, like nearly all the airfields, was operating effectively during the last half of August and the first days of September, this was the period of greater strain; a time when men like Alan Deere had to confess that they were ‘really flaked out’.
C. Hector MacLean, who took over A Flight of 602 Squadron when Dunlop Urie was badly wounded on 18 August, told of his arrival at West Hampnett a few days earlier. ‘I followed Pilot Officer [now Air Commodore] Paul Webb to the mess – a village type of farmhouse across the road. Through the door I could see two disconsolate young officers sitting at the foot of the staircase clutching their personal belongings. “Come on in,” Paul Webb told me, “and meet 145 Squadron – great chaps, both of them.”’
Even the toughest pilots like Bob Stanford Tuck and ‘Ginger’ Lacey began to feel the strain after many weeks of fighting, with two, three and sometimes four ops a day, and noting the absence of friends and fellow pilots from the mess – or seeing them go down in flames. ‘My nerves were in ribbons and I was scared stiff that one day I would pull out and avoid combat,’ Lacey recalled. ‘That frightened me more than the Germans and I pleaded with my CO for a rest. He was sympathetic but quite adamant that until he got replacements I would have to carry on. I am glad now that he was unable to let me go. If I had been allowed to leave the squadron, feeling as I did, I am sure that I would never have flown again.’6
Harold Bird-Wilson, today a highly decorated retired air commodore, recalled the wretchedness of ‘witnessing the execution in mortal combat of your friends. A fighter pilot was apt to place an invisible shield about himself, which may have given the air of callousness, but in reality it was a necessary protection against mental and physical strain.’7
On the British side, no day was to tax the resources and skills of those on the ground, and those in the air, more than 18 August. It was a day of sudden descents on airfields from heights ranging from fifty to 20,000 feet, of frantic refuelling and rearming of hot aircraft in the dust and heat of a cloudless summer Sunday, of snap decisions and actions taken against the background of exploding bombs and the unharmonious chatter of guns of many calibres firing from the air and from the ground, of blinding weariness broken by stabs of fear.
Never, since the outset of the Battle, had the Luftwaffe made such determined attempts to wipe out RAF airfields, and never had the defence been more indomitable. Scores of men died in the air, burnt or shot, died as they struck the ground, died by their aircraft on the ground, by their guns, in air-raid shelters, or simply going about their business, on airfields, or at home in the towns and villages of southern England.
No church bells tolled for the dead, nor even rang out on this Sabbath for Matins or Evensong. The sounds were all of war.
Following his most recent talk with Goering, Kesselring still believed that the only effective strategy was to send out very heavily escorted raids, supported distantly by ‘free chase’ Geschwader of Me 109s, the first to destroy the airfields and force the enemy to rise to the challenge, the second to meet this challenge and destroy Fighter Command in the air, too. But an important modification was introduced for the first time this Sunday: concentration on not more than two targets – Kenley and Biggin Hill – instead of more widely scattered raids, which both he and Sperrle had practised up to this time.
Briefings on both these attacks took place at numerous Luftflotte 2 airfields soon after dawn. For the Kenley attack, KG76 was fully involved and in three capacities. A precision dive-bombing attack on the station buildings was to be followed immediately by a high-level attack by Dorniers. The third act in this drama of destruction was to be performed by the 9th Staffel led by Hauptmann Joachim Roth, and promised a surprise ending.
Roth’s briefing took place at Cormeilles-en-Vexin, fifteen miles inland from that 1920s’ haunt of the leisured rich, Deauville, and what he had to say greatly intrigued and excited his pilots and crews. They were, for the first time, to fly all the way to the target, and attack, from ultra-low level. Roth showed them their route, which took them across the Channel on a north-westerly heading, using the great white promontory of Beachy Head as a landmark but edging to the low land of the River Ouse Estuary to the west and using ‘the iron beam’ – the railway lines from Lewes and Brighton north towards London – as their route guide. Kenley was conveniently located high up in the outer suburbs a few miles to the north after a long tunnel on the east–west railway line east of Reigate. Roth was confident they could not miss, forgetting how that veteran low-level navigator and attacker, the late Hauptmann Walter Rubensdoerffer, had failed to find Kenley on his last, fatal operation.
The nine Dorniers crossed the coast with no more opposition than a few bursts of machine-gun fire from a naval patrol boat offshore, and began to disturb many a family Sunday lunch as they raced north in wide line-abreast at 100 feet or lower, picking up the Southern Railway electric line without difficulty, amusing themselves machine-gunning the streets. They had been too low for even the CHL Beachy Head radar, but the Observer Corps post a few yards away had spotted them, counted them and reported them to Horsham. No. 11 Group ops had the news thirty seconds later.
Thanks to the visual sighting from Beachy Head, and subsequent Observer Corps reports as Roth led his bombers north towards the North Downs, Kenley had plenty of warning of what was likely to come: ‘Air attack imminent: all personnel not on defence duties to the shelters.’ A lot of airmen and WAAFs were eating their midday dinner and resented the interruption, but only a few disregarded the warning. This sector station was well protected by anti-aircraft guns and by Parachute and Cable. PAC was a novel device by which a 500-foot length of steel cable was launched by a rocket. At the limit of its trajectory a parachute was opened, holding the vertical cable before slowly descending. If the cable was struck by any part of a raider, a second parachute at the base automatically opened, leaving the aircraft with the impossible burden of a heavy cable trailing two parachutes. At Kenley, the launchers were sited at sixty-foot intervals outside the northern perimeter track and were arranged to be fired in salvoes of nine.
All the gunners were at their posts, tense and ready. What they had not reckoned with was the extreme low level of the bombers, which appeared from over the trees and were on the airfield before a gun barrel could be swung in their direction. The nine Dorniers were dead on target, racing over the hangars, administration buildings, messes, domestic blocks, ops room and station headquarters, releasing their 110 pound bombs like broadcast corn from a farmer’s pouch.
One of the German aircrew caught a glimpse of the bombs falling dead centre into the hangars. ‘Other bombs were bouncing down the runway like rubber balls,’ he recalled. ‘Hell was let loose. Then the bombs began their work of destruction. Three hangars collapsed like matchwood. Explosion followed explosion, flames leapt into the sky.’8
Within seconds, the 9th Staffel had sown the wind; now they were to reap the whirlwind. As the Dorniers streaked across the airfield, every gun opened up. The leading pilot in the right-hand section was struck in the chest by a single Lewis gun bullet and fell dead on his controls. Wilhelm Raab, flying number two in the centre section, had just passed over a refuelling tanker when the PAC went into action. It was the first time ever, the circumstances were ideal and the timing was dead right.
‘Suddenly red-glowing balls rose up from the ground in front of me,’ Raab later wrote. ‘Each one trailed a line of smoke about one metre thick behind it, with intervals of ten to fifteen metres between each. I had experienced machine-gun fire and flak fire often enough, but this was something entirely new…. I felt a hefty tug on my machine. “Now they’ve got us,” I thought. “We are going to smash into the ground.”’9 But because the Dornier was in a steep bank when it struck the cable, Raab succeeded in clearing it and, although later damaged by anti-aircraft fire, he got back to base intact.
But the PACs succeeded in wrecking at least one, and possibly two more Dorniers, although it was impossible to distinguish between the effects of the intense ground fire and the cables. But one doomed pilot, Feldwebel Petersen, provided what amounted to a set-piece demonstration of the PAC’s effectiveness. The cable caught the Dornier’s wing and the drag of the two parachutes simply tipped the bomber straight into the ground. The explosion killed not only the crew of four but a high-ranking observer, Oberst Otto Sommer.
Although Roth had been confused to find the airfield untouched when he arrived, he later realised how fortunate it had been that the Junkers dive-bombers and the He 111 high-level bombers had mistimed their flights. The smoke and dust from the low-level raid offered perfect target identification, and at the same time obscured them from the anti-aircraft gunners who had the greatest difficulty in laying their guns with any accuracy.
There was probably no more than a three-minute interval between the departure of the surviving low-level Dorniers – hotly pursued by 111 and 615 Squadrons, with Roth himself in serious trouble – and the intense, high-level bombing, although for many of those on the ground, half-stunned by the noise and fury of the first attack, it was much longer. By a merciful chance of fate the vulnerable, brick ops room controlling the entire sector was not hit. But inside the silence that succeeded the explosions and the gunfire seemed even more intense in this enclosed space because all the power and almost all the telephone lines had gone dead. The airmen and WAAF plotters at the table, in their tin hats and with gas masks at the ready, looked up questioningly to the dais above where their officers were, for a few seconds, looking equally bemused.
Then one of the officers yelled at them angrily, as if they were responsible. ‘Don’t just stand there – take cover! There’s nothing you can do now!’10
Not far distant from the ops room, an airman shouted down to some WAAFs in a shelter that there was an unexploded bomb outside. The corporal in charge led out her girls as if on parade: no panic please! They glanced at the blazing hangars in wonder before marching away in the best manner of coolness in the face of danger. But almost at once a clearly terrified RAF officer running towards them yelled, ‘Get to a shelter you silly women. The bombing hasn’t finished yet.”11 He was right. As the WAAFs sought another shelter the high-level bombing began, heralding the further mutilation of Kenley.
Twelve thousand feet above, the most effective fighter attack was by Mike Crossley’s 32 Squadron, which was in the right place at the right time. As he caught sight of a swarm of Dorniers with Me 110 close escort, he called out to the controller, ‘Jacko leader, Jacko leader– Tally Ho!’
No. 32 Squadron had often practised the head-on, line-abreast attack. Now, after ordering B Flight to look after the escort, Crossley led A Flight straight in at a closing speed of well over 400 mph.
‘The bombers were stepped up, in close formation,’ Alan ‘Shag’ Eckford recalled. ‘I remember thinking, as I was approaching the formation, that if I opened fire at the first one and then gradually lifted my nose and kept the button pressed, several would have to pass through my fire.’12 But there was no time. Instead he was content to maul a Dornier, which lurched out of formation and fell away in a spin.
As for Eckford’s CO, Crossley sent down a Ju 88, which crashed near Ashford, and also claimed a 110 as a probable, though he did not see it go in. But the most telling effect of this attack, by no more than half-a-dozen Hurricanes against some fifty escorted bombers, was to break up the formation as it was on its bombing run, causing many of the bombers to lose their target and drop their loads haphazardly elsewhere in most cases.
All this would have been impossible but for the desperate and expensive efforts of 615 Squadron’s Hurricanes, who took on the bombers’ top cover of uncounted 109s. Outnumbered at least five to one, it was not easy to score in a Hurricane against aggressive and skilfully handled 109s, which could choose their moment of attack and withdraw at leisure, as well as opening cannon fire far beyond the range of Browning .303s. Within a few minutes, 615 had lost four Hurricanes in the air, with one pilot killed, and with six more destroyed on the ground as a result of the raid 15,000 feet below them.
One of those shot down by the hardened veterans of JG26 was Petrus Hendrink Hugo – ‘Dutch’ Hugo for his thick Afrikaans accent – one of several brilliant South African pilots in the Battle. ‘Dutch’s’ shooting was almost on a par with ‘Sailor’ Malan’s, and he already had a number of victories to his credit, in France and on his return to England. (He ended the war as one of the most decorated fighter pilots with an accredited twenty-two victories.) But this was not his lucky day, and he was badly shot about when he managed to crash-land his Hurricane at Orpington – which, to his fury, put him out of the fighting for five weeks.
At Kenley, as soon as the smoke and dust had settled, it became clear that the airfield was temporarily non-operational, and ground stripes were put out to instruct aircraft to land at satellite airstrips, although R/T communication was re-established by 1.37 p.m. through the reserve transmitter. Without water supply, the fires raged unchecked for some time, until civil fire brigades answered the station’s SOS – in the event rather too enthusiastically, leading to road congestion.
Three items in the station commander’s report to 11 Group reflect well on the performance of his men and women:
27. The hospital and reserve hospital were destroyed. One of the medical officers was killed in a shelter trench near hospital. The remaining medical staff, however, worked splendidly and with assistance of civil doctors the situation was soon in hand.
28. The ground defences were seriously hampered by firstly the approach of raid being screened so that the low raid could not be engaged before it had released its bombs and the fact that smoke from low raid prevented the high raid being seen easily. Effective action was, however, taken by gun crews….
29. All ground defence crews remained at their posts and engaged the enemy under heavy fire.
Two further items were covered with typical laconic economy: ‘24 unexploded bombs dealt with.… Aerodrome was made serviceable in about two hours.’
Corporal David Samson wrote about the loss of ‘a very important officer, the MO, and I remember that for this reason our OR [other ranks] casualties were taken by private car to Purley Hospital as all medical facilities were out of action.’
As the first repair work began at Kenley, Kesselring’s He 111 is, Dorniers and Ju 88s were heading for Biggin Hill, the Heinkels in stepped-up waves between 12,000 and 15,000 feet, sixty of them in all with forty 109s keeping watchful guard above. The first squadron to get near them was 610, which had managed to put fifteen Spitfires into the air. But the odds of two-and-a-half to one made life very difficult for Squadron Leader John Ellis and his men. Ellis had already been credited with the singular distinction of shooting down three Me 109s in a day, and added to his score this lunchtime with an He 111.
No. 32 Squadron, 610’s ‘chummy’ squadron from Biggin Hill, got in amongst the bomber stream, which seemed to grow minute by minute, and in variety of types. Pilot Officer John ‘Polly’ Flinders, whose Hurricane was unserviceable, belatedly grabbed the reserve training machine, which was not renowned for its performance. But at 12,000 feet – and, oh, how long it seemed to take to get there! – he chanced on a Me 110. The German pilot immediately dived for safety, hoping (quite reasonably) that he could outpace the Hurricane. But Flinders’s veteran gained a new lease of life, and he found he was gaining on the big fighter. In desperation, the German dropped to 200 feet and began doing barrel rolls and half rolls at this height, which did not impress his pursuer and lost the Messerschmitt pilot speed as he raced unknowingly over the Kent countryside towards the well-defended inland radar station at Dunkirk near Canterbury. The Bofors gunners now took a vital part in the combat, hitting and further slowing down the 110.
Flinders was able to close in to 150 yards and open fire, with immediately fatal results, over the village of Harbledown. It was just after 1.30 p.m. and by this time the skies above Kent and Sussex had become the setting for countless mêlées. With Kenley out of action, sector controllers were fast losing control of events. At Biggin Hill Group Captain Richard Grice stood behind the controller watching the plots moving towards his station like hyenas on a tethered prey. When he calculated that they had less than five minutes to spare, he pressed the button which sounded the alarm over the Tannoy loud-speakers. As the howling died, he spoke, with his usual calmness: ‘This is your station commander. At any moment we may be attacked. I want all personnel except those engaged on essential services to take cover immediately.’
The Luftwaffe’s tactical plan was the same as for Kenley, but once again the low-level Dorniers were early, or the high-level bombers late, so it was a repeat performance, the nine Dorniers coming in at 100 feet, spreading flames and destruction:
Pillars of flame in spiral volume rise,
Like fiery snakes, and lick the infernal skies.
The noise was ear-splitting and prolonged, but these Dorniers paid an even higher price than those attacking Kenley a few minutes earlier. The PAC rockets soared, causing the same dismay to the pilots and wrenching two of the slim bombers from the sky. Moreover, Biggin Hill’s own squadrons, 610 and 32, were now thick in among the fleeing Dorniers.
Only two of the nine Dorniers returned safely and one of these was landed by the flight engineer, his pilot dead beside him.
There was an interval of no more than three minutes when, as at Kenley, the second attack fell on the airfield, this time from high altitude. Even if they had known, and believed it, it was no comfort to those huddled in the shelters and slit trenches, with arms over ears, that it would have been twice as bad, and twice as destructive, if their own fighters were not mobbing the bombers 12,000 to 15,000 feet above. Least of all could they appreciate the struggle these fighters were enduring to evade the 109s, which seemed to be everywhere and to be as tenacious as aroused wasps.
Thanks entirely to this intervention, the bombing was poor. The greatest weight of explosive fell to the east of Biggin Hill and on the airfield itself. Few buildings were touched. Then, with the last of the dust and smoke drifting away on the wind, the Salvation Army van appeared like a ghost from the holocaust, fulfilling the ‘Sally Ally’s’ proverb of ‘reaching a class of people that churches never do’. In less than a minute a queue had formed for its ‘wads’ and half-pint mugs of hot sweet tea.
Ignoring this swift return to routine, an almost middle-aged WAAF, Sergeant Joan Mortimer, emerged from her switchboard in the armoury where she had been relaying messages to the defence posts about the airfield, surrounded by high-explosive. She had a bundle of red flags in her hand as she walked purposefully on to the airfield to join the disposal team. Each sinister bulge indicating an unexploded bomb was marked, and when one exploded not very distantly, she carried on helping with the defusing as if nothing had happened. She received the Military Medal for this act, the first of three Biggin Hill WAAFs to be so decorated. She never understood why.
Few were caught out in the open during the Biggin Hill raid. But by ironical coincidence two of them were German aircrew, Joachim Roth, who had led the low-level raid on Kenley and been savagely mauled by Hurricanes, and his fellow surviving crew member, Rudolf Lamberty. Roth had crash-landed his burning Dornier in a field just outside the perimeter of Biggin Hill. The two shaken Germans, and their captors, lay flat on the grass close to the burning bomber and dead fellow crew members, wishing their comrades would desist.
After the loss of their CO, Rodney Wilkinson, two days earlier, and two more pilots lost and two badly wounded, the harsh treatment of 266 Squadron (Spitfires) continued. Dennis Armitage had temporarily taken over command and soon after noon had been ordered down from Hornchurch to patrol Manston. The Squadron mixed it briefly with some Dorniers, without success, and were then ordered to land to rearm and refuel at this battered base – so battered that the craters obliged them to park in one small area to await the attention of the servicing crews. ‘Pilots stood around, the shimmering vapour distorting vision as the fuel was sent gushing into the fighters’ tanks. Belts of ammunition were threaded into the guns, oxygen bottles changed, the whole operation moving swiftly. Overhead the sky was full of planes and the pilots and airmen hoped that someone knew what was going on.”3
Oberleutnant Wolfgang Ewald did. He was leading sixteen Me 109s of JG52, covering the withdrawal of the German bombers, flying high but not too high to see the little crosses of the massed Spitfires on the grass at Manston, and others on their final approach. He had completed his Gruppe’s duties and now decided to put in some overtime.
A 266 straggler, Sergeant Don Kingaby, was landing as the 109s came streaking down. ‘They hit us soon after I taxied in. There was no warning, just the roar of their engines. I glanced round and found myself looking along the nose of a Messerschmitt coming straight for me.’14
Kingaby was later to be awarded no fewer than three DFMs, a DSO, an American DFC and a Belgian Croix de Guerre and survived the Battle and the war. But he had his closest brush not in the air, but while rolling over and over on mother earth, bullets and cannon shells tearing up the grass around him. He got away with one nicked finger. Pilot Officer Trousdale, also caught in the open and still wearing his parachute, simply knelt in the dust with his’ chute towards the enemy, ‘just like a Mohammedan at prayer’, Dennis Armitage ribbed him later.
But there was not much laughter for 266 that evening. They had lost most of their planes, destroyed or damaged, and there was not much left to command when Squadron Leader Desmond Spencer arrived to take over. Within days 266 was withdrawn to Wittering.
One of the most extraordinary incidents of the day was a massacre over Ashford, a town that probably witnessed more air fighting during the Battle than any other except Dover. Here, at about 1 p.m. 56 Squadron (Hurricanes) were patrolling defensively at their maximum efficient height of 22,000 feet when one of the pilots spotted five twin-engined aircraft flying in a tight defensive circle as if they had become lost and now scented danger. They were identified as Me 110s, which could probably have got home safely if they had at once put down their noses. Instead, they awaited the arrival of the Hurricanes with seemingly calm fatalism. The Hurricanes promptly tore into them, easily out-circling the big fighters and shooting them all out of the sky.
None of the unfortunate 110 aircrew baled out, but in all eight RAF fighter pilots used their parachutes in the orthodox way that early afternoon, and more later in the day. One of them was the ubiquitous Bob Stanford Tuck. He was on a visit to Northolt, far from his squadron in 10 Group, when every fighter there was suddenly scrambled. Although his radio lacked the correct frequency, and no permission was sought or given, he took off anyway, carrying out a one-man patrol at 15,000 feet over Beachy Head, which seemed a likely place for action. Two low-flying 110s, which he misidentified as Ju 88s, duly appeared below, heading home fast.
Tuck went down, made a head-on attack on one, which at once went into the sea, pushed his luck with another head-on and was hit by cannon shells, which should have told him this was no Junkers. He nearly made it back to an airfield, but fire drove him from his cockpit and he took to the silk.
Tuck was well received on the ground. As on 16 August, others had a hostile, some a downright dangerous, reception. Pilot Officer Kenneth Lee’s was mixed: ‘Having been shot down and lightly wounded I was taken to a local golf club, just inland from Whitstable, to await an ambulance. I was in shirtsleeves, slightly bloodstained, but couldn’t help hearing members at the last hole complaining that the distraction of the Battle in the air was disturbing their putting, while once inside a voice demanded, “Who’s that scruffy looking chap at the bar? I don’t think he’s a member.”’
Peter Simpson of 111 Squadron, who was shot down by one of the low-flying Dorniers he was chasing home, crash-landed on to another golf course, Woodcote Park. His reception was even more hostile than Lee’s. Enraged golfers brandished their clubs menacingly and threatened him. The Hurricane pilot hoped he had been mistaken for a German, as indeed he had, in spite of the prominent roundels on the machine in which he was sitting. Simpson was injured, and very angry, and shouted at his assailants, even producing a packet of Player’s cigarettes to establish his identity.
The golfers cooled down, the pilot jumped off the wing on to the grass and let out a howl of pain. ‘At that moment other people approached, one of whom said he was a doctor,’ Simpson recalled later when he was a much-decorated wing commander. ‘He sat me down, took my shoe and sock off, and pulled out one of the splinters. My foot was all numb, with blood pouring out; I thought the whole foot was going to have to come off! But he said it was nothing serious.’15
Unlike Kenneth Lee, Simpson was now given a sympathetic reception in the club house, with lunch and brandy, too much for his well-being. It was difficult to reconcile the desperate August air fighting with all its attendant dangers and destruction of human life and property with the habitual pursuits of walks, picnics, summer games or simply sitting out of doors enjoying the sun. But there was little that the vast majority of the citizens of Kent, Surrey and Sussex, many of whom were on holiday, could contribute to the epochal events taking place above them. And because the weather was mainly warm and cloudless, the fighting was witnessed by more non-participants than any other battle in history.
At Sissinghurst Castle in Kent the Harold Nicolsons spent most of the day in their incomparable garden, their son Ben coming over to luncheon. Harold Nicolson noted in his diary:
While we are sitting outside the air-raid siren sounds. We remain where we are. Then comes the sound of aeroplanes and, looking up, we see thin streamers from the exhausts of the German ‘planes. Another wave follows, and we see it clearly – twenty little silver fish in arrow formation. There is no sound of firing, but while we are at luncheon we hear’ planes quite close and go out to see. There is a rattle of machine-gun fire and we see two Spitfires attacking a Heinkel. The latter sways off, obviously wounded. We then go on with our luncheon. Ben talks to us about Roger Fry and Virginia….16
Lord Halifax, the Foreign Minister who had been tipped by many to take over the premiership in preference to Churchill only three months earlier, appears to have found the battles raging over the south-east something of a relaxation, for his biographer writes:
[Halifax] had little recreation that summer while the country waited for a German invasion…. He found the best restoratives of this time were the Saturday nights and weekends he was occasionally able to steal to visit friends within easy reach of London, watching from Victor Cazalet’s garden in Kent one of the summer battles in the air and forgetting the war.17
The Secretary of State for War was also pleased with what he called his ‘front seats with a view of the Battle of Britain’ from his house, Park Gate, outside Elham. Anthony Eden wrote:
There were frequent air battles overhead, sometimes while we were playing tennis. There was great excitement one day while I was in my bath. One of our fighters and a Messerschmitt had a battle over the garden. It looked as though the German as he crashed must hit our house. Actually his plane fell in the wood a few hundred yards behind and he baled out in front, between us and the village.18
Fun though this might be, Eden decided that things were getting too lively for his wife and two small sons, and he moved them to a place near Oxford in relative safety.
Often planes were seen crashing and (as at Elham) people ran from all directions, eager to give a hostile reception as it was almost always assumed that the victim was German. Golf courses offered good open spaces for crash-landing, or baling out, but a pilot in distress could fare better elsewhere. It was at about this time in the Battle that Pilot Officer (later Wing Commander DFC) George Nelson Edwards ‘crash-landed wheels up next door to a large country house near Oxted. I was knocked unconscious for a minute or so and on coming round the first thing I saw was a large, beautifully coloured parrot perched on the side of the cockpit, its beak wide open, eyes blinking at me as if in astonishment. Momentarily I wondered whether the “place up yonder” was all exotic birds. Then I realised I was still alive as a human head appeared and a hand stretched towards me proffering a large brandy.’
The brandy was a welcome pick-me-up. But as Pilot Officer Simpson learned, the hospitality could be too enthusiastic. Most aircrew, officers and non-commissioned officers drank beer and could put down half-a-dozen pints in an evening without regretting it. But many of them were very young and unaccustomed to spirits. David Cox DFC, Croix de Guerre, of 19 Squadron, was hit in the leg by six cannon shell splinters, but managed to bale out. He landed near a farmhouse and was carried to it by a farmer and one of his men, where he was simply given a bottle of whisky and a glass and told to get on with it.
‘On arrival at the hospital and being taken to the operating theatre,’ Cox recalled, ‘the nursing sister in charge remarked that from the strong smell she wondered if an anaesthetic was required.’
The following is an assessment of the gains and losses to each side in these two midday raids of 18 August:
Once again the return of damaged German aircraft, many of which crash-landed with dead or injured aircrew, was not calculated to lift the enemy’s morale.
This, then, was the position in the early afternoon of this eventful and bloody 18 August. For Kesselring and Sperrle, and many of the aircrew, the worst of the day still lay ahead.
By 18 August the Luftwaffe, having for some time recognised that photo-reconnaissance below 30,000 feet was far too expensive in men and machines, was using a specially developed, very high altitude machine. This was the Junkers 86P, a development of an unacceptably slow, twin-engined bomber tried out in the Spanish Civil War, and also used as an airliner carrying ten passengers. As a photo-reconnaissance machine, the Junkers was powered by advanced, double-supercharged, diesel engines, the crew enjoying a necessary pressurised cabin. These were the machines that were frequently plotted over England during the Battle, and being far beyond the range of any anti-aircraft gun and maximum altitude of any fighter, there was nothing that could be done about them.
On the other hand, at these altitudes, even superb German optical equipment was unable to reveal detail with any accuracy; and that was the reason why Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 had been informed by intelligence that the Coastal Command airfield at Thorney Island, and the naval air stations at Ford and Gosport, were important front-line Fighter Command airfields: the parked aircraft appeared to confirm it.
On this afternoon then, the Ju 87 Stukas from Normandy and Brittany were ordered to destroy these targets as decisively as Kesselring’s bombers had apparently wiped out Kenley that day, or as comprehensively as they had ‘destroyed’ Tangmere two days earlier. As a bonus, Poling radar station was to be wiped out as they had wiped out Ventnor. From across the Channel, the tactical reasoning appeared as sound as, in the event, it was almost totally unsound.
One hundred and eleven dive-bombers were assigned to this early afternoon operation, with half as many Me 109s providing cover. They were plotted approaching the Isle of Wight soon after 2 p.m., and as they headed towards the mainland east of Portsmouth the massive formation shed units to left and right like infantry on parade-ground evolutions.
Fearful of another attack as destructive as the one on Tangmere, 10 and 11 Groups had scrambled every squadron within reasonable range, even from as far as Exeter, while controllers attempted to interpret from Observer Corps reports and radar plots the likely targets. There was a lot of luck as well as intuition involved in this decision-making. Of the four targets, Gosport was attacked without any interference, the twenty-two 87s causing mountainous damage and heading some distance towards home before seeing an enemy fighter.
The Thorney Island attackers, however, were caught by 43 and 601 Squadrons as they positioned themselves for the tip-over, and although distant 109s were on the look-out, the eighteen Hurricanes had a field day amongst the vulnerable 87s.
Thorney Island escaped the worst of the damage. Poling and Ford, bombed before the fighters could intercept, suffered badly. Damage to the three airfields was irrelevant to the effectiveness of Fighter Command.
The attack on Poling, in contrast, was a blow directly aimed at the Fighter Command system, and was the more dangerous since the station at Ventnor had already been wrecked. Approximately ninety bombs were dropped and the station was badly damaged. Emergency equipment was installed but it could no longer give comprehensive and reliable information on enemy movements.19
In fact, Poling remained effectively unserviceable until the end of August. This was not as handicapping to Fighter Command’s warning structure as it might have been, because back-up semi-mobile radar had been installed on the Isle of Wight and soon would be at Poling, and the CH stations were unaffected. But there is no question that the knocking out of Kenley sector control earlier, and now Poling CH,* were rather worse than inconveniences to Air Marshals Dowding and Park.
But Luftflotte 3 paid a price which Sperrle regarded as unacceptable. ‘One Stuka Gruppe’, Freiherr von Richthofen noted in his diary, ‘was almost exterminated.’ Mixing his metaphors, he added, ‘It has had its feathers well and truly plucked.’20 The Luftwaffe War Diaries noted:
The main victim was 1/StG77. Of its twenty-eight aircraft twelve failed to return, and six others were so shot up that they only just reached French soil. Amongst the missing was the Gruppe’s commander, Captain Meisel. Adding the casualties of the other Gruppen, thirty Ju 87s were either lost or severely damaged. The price was too high. The Stuka had to be withdrawn.21
This was an extremely serious blow to Goering. The Stuka with its bomb-load of one 550 pound and four 110 pound bombs was a pinpoint destroyer. Just as the US Navy dive-bombers turned the tide in the Pacific war less than two years later at Midway, so the Stuka could have done untold damage to the Royal Navy in the event of the defeat of Fighter Command and a German invasion, as it did later in the Mediterranean.
The chief beneficiaries of this last fling of the Stuka were the pilots of 43, 152 and 602 Squadrons, who cut the relatively helpless Junkers to shreds as they fled singly or in pairs out to sea. But many of the German gunner-radio operators fought back gamely with their single 7.9 mm gun. Flight Sergeant Bill Pond of 601 Squadron reported hitting repeatedly one Junkers, and waited for it to go down while exchanging bursts of fire with his eight Brownings with the gunner – ‘a very brave man,’ he commented: an accurate gunner, too, for before he was killed he hit the Hurricane’s engine and forced Pond to break off and then, at the sight of 109s, to dive away for his life. The Stuka struggled home, the pilot wounded.
But it also took a special sort of courage to press home attacks against bombers knowing that Messerschmitts were falling on you from the heavens like avenging angels.
* * *
This was one of the greatest days of fighting on the 10 Group–11 Group border, and once again what the Luftwaffe regarded as England’s soft underbelly demonstrated its muscular and destructive powers. Tens of thousands of people heard the bombing and the air battles, in this populous area of southern England; and thousands saw the smoke rising from the buildings of the bombed airfields. But they also witnessed fragments of the fighting, confirming clearly enough the superiority of the RAF, which the BBC and the newspapers proclaimed stridently every day.
A weekend guest of the Bessboroughs at Stansted Park, Rowland’s Castle, took the daughter of the house on to the terrace in the hope of seeing ‘one of these great air battles’.
It was after lunch and we were looking towards Thorney Island with the Portsmouth balloons just visible over the trees to our right. Suddenly we heard the sound of AA fire and saw puffs of white smoke as the shells burst over Portsmouth. Then to our left, from the direction of Chichester and Tangmere, came the roar of engines and the noise of machine-gun fire. ‘There they are,’ exclaimed Moyra, and shading our eyes to escape the glare of this August day we saw not far in front of us about twenty machines engaged in a fight. Soon a German bomber came hurtling down with smoke pouring from its tail … a parachute opened and sank gracefully down through the whirling fighters and bombers. Out of the mêlée came a dive-bomber, hovered like a bird of prey and then sped steeply down on Thorney Island.22
At 5 p.m. on this August day there were still more than three hours before sunset, and Park was confident that, as on so many previous evenings, Luftflotte 2 would be back for one last fling. He was right. Within half an hour big plots showed up off the Kent coast and off the Essex coast north of the Thames Estuary. Over 100 Dorniers and Heinkels in all were evidently bound for Hornchurch and North Weald.
Many of Park’s pilots had flown two sorties already this day, but once again the Hurricanes and Spitfires were scrambled in maximum strength, the Hurricanes breaking up the formations while, in the main, the Spitfires dealt with the 109s. No. 501 was very hotly involved, and Flight Lieutenant George Stoney, with two Ju 87s to his credit, was seen attacking some fifty Dorniers head-on. Single-handed he broke them up and then was seized upon by the 109s. ‘He fell like a rock,’ commented one of the German pilots. ‘A very brave man.’ Then two wild 501 Polish pilots waded into the mêlée, burning with hatred and the lust for revenge. They quickly shot out of the sky a 109 each, including one of the highest scoring Luftwaffe fighter pilots, Hauptmann Horst Tietzen.
These fights that spread over the Kent and Essex countryside were like some Wagnerian climax to this ‘the hardest day of the Battle’, as it came to be known. Meanwhile, the reformed bombers struggled on, searching for their targets. But on this evening, the weather became Fighter Command’s blessed ally, cutting visibility and spreading a merciful grey cloud over this corner of England. The sufferers were the civilians. Hundreds of bombs were jettisoned or dropped on half-seen secondary targets, which included built-up areas. Many men, women and children were killed in their homes, or their little domestic shelters. Their involuntary sacrifice was for the sake of Fighter Command, and this country, just as if they were fighting for it.
It was no more than a foretaste of what was to come as the nights grew longer and the days shorter, and the skies throbbed to the sound of unsynchronised Heinkel bomber engines from dusk until dawn.
* Underpaid pilot officers especially were known to add’… and for so little’, according to Pilot Officer Michael Appleby of 609 Squadron, whose savage deductions of tax from his pay were incorrectly attributed to his civilian earnings. Others suffered similarly.
* The radar stations forming the chain enjoyed a degree of overlap which offered some cover, if restricted, when one station was not operating.