7 SEPTEMBER
At Northolt, Tangmere and Gravesend especially, where the previous day’s losses had fallen most heavily and the absent faces at breakfast in the officers’ and sergeants’ messes were most conspicuous, there was immense relief when the sunny early morning passed without a telephone call at the dispersals. The young WAAFs at Dover, Rye and Pevensey CH radar stations stared at tubes that remained blip-free for so long that, once or twice, an officer had to remind them not to relax their attention. Cigarette ends in old tobacco tins piled high and there were more calls than usual for tea. Only at Wittering – of all places – was there any excitement. No. 266 Squadron had recently been transferred to this Midlands sector station for a rest, much to their disgust. But early in the morning A Flight had been brought to immediate readiness. The CO warned that it was only the usual German recce to check the previous night’s bombing, in this case of Liverpool, but the pilots felt particularly satisfied that the authorities’ efforts to wrap them in cotton wool had been thwarted, especially as they had just received their new, more powerful Mark 2 Spitfires.
At 8.30 a.m., the New Zealanders Dick Trousdale, Wycliff Williams and Bob Roach – all pilot officers – were scrambled and took off in formation down the tarmacadam runway, which felt like a billiard table after grass. ‘There’s a single bandit angels twenty-eight approaching from the north-west,’ the controller told them. Williams ordered emergency boost and five minutes later they caught sight first of the German’s contrail and then of the minute dot that was marking the sky. As if suddenly aware of the identifying trail the plane – it looked like a Do 215 – was leaving, the pilot gained or lost enough altitude to extinguish it.
B Flight at dawn readiness: George Welford of 607 Squadron, early awake, sketched this characteristic scene at Tangmere, September 1940.
As the Spitfires passed over the Norfolk coast, the enemy was still far distant and travelling faster than their climbing speed. The three Spitfire pilots glanced anxiously at their engine temperature gauges, for they had already far exceeded the period permitted for emergency boost. The Dutch–Belgian coast was a grey smudge ahead when they achieved the Dornier’s altitude at last and began to overhaul the enemy, although Trousdale’s engine was feeling the strain and he was obliged to pull back the throttle and then to turn for home.
The two remaining Spitfires closed in on the Dornier and opened fire at around 500 yards from port and starboard, using twenty to thirty degrees deflection, making no strikes on their first pass and receiving some highly accurate return fire. Williams and Roach reported later that this made them so angry that they both, in turn, closed in to much shorter range during their second attack. The Dornier pilot slewed and jinked for all he was worth, but the effect of fire from sixteen .303 Brownings ignited the big, twin-engined machine like a scraped match. The ball of flame dropped beneath them, and to the two pilots’ astonishment, they saw that it was going to crash on enemy soil – in fact, as they identified later, on Walcheren at the mouth of the Scheldt Estuary. No one was seen to bale out.
Williams and Roach turned for home, nursing their fuel and keeping a sharp look-out for the enemy. But the sky was clear to every horizon. Fifteen thousand feet below an invisible boat trailed a wake as white as the demolished Dornier’s earlier contrail. It might almost have been a pleasure boat out from Lowestoft on this peaceful summer morning. All the portents suggested another lull.
At the time when the two Spitfire pilots were recrossing the Norfolk coast, a heavily escorted pair of open Mercedes staff cars drove up the dusty straight road towards St Omer. In the first car, beaming contentment after a massive breakfast, sat Reichsmarschall Goering, resplendent in unbuttoned long leather coat which artfully failed to conceal his decorations and orders, the Iron Cross First Class and pilot’s wings. Facing him were Bruno Loerzer, commander of II Fliegerkorps, who had travelled from his headquarters at Ghent, and Kesselring. Goering had arrived to witness personally from the nearest point on French soil the opening of the final stage of the Battle, and, as he announced over the radio, ‘I have taken over personal command of the Luftwaffe in its war against England.’
Meanwhile, there was time to visit some of his aircrew before they took off, and he had chosen the Me 109 Lehrgeschwader based at Calais-Marck. There was nothing that Goering enjoyed more than ‘mixing in with the boys’ as he called it, recalling his own fighter pilot days back in 1917, joking about the relative performance of his 120 mph Fokker and these E-type 109s with their 370 mph top speed and cannon armament. How ‘the boys’ loved it when he attempted, with predictable non-success, to squeeze his massive frame into the slender Messerschmitt cockpit!
By 2 p.m. the two Marshals, surrounded by their staff, and on the outer fringes two dozen combination BMW motorcycles bristling with Mausers, had moved on to an elaborate picnic yards from the cliff edge at Cap Gris Nez. But for the absence of women in long summer dresses and wide hats, this repast might have been taking place in the enclosure behind the best stand at Longchamps. But instead of the thunder of hooves on turf, the sound that this party heard as they sipped their champagne was the distant rumble of aircraft engines. It grew, at first slowly and then more rapidly, to a deep roar. A sharp-eyed major was the first to spot the vanguard of the armada far to the south, and he pointed its direction to one of Goering’s staff, who in turn indicated to the Reichsmarschall the multitude of crosses in the sky, in serried ranks like the World War I graves beside the road along which they had driven through Flanders.
Goering stood up from his collapsible seat, settling his binoculars on the first spearhead of the Heinkels and Dorniers which were now circling some ten miles away before forming up with the twin-engined fighter screen on each flank and, almost invisible above, the little 109s – some from the airfield they had recently inspected. As the bombers and their escort groaned deafeningly overhead, gaining altitude, to these senior officers it was as if the frustrating weeks of struggle in the air, with its distressing casualties, and the Phoenix-like reappearance of the Hurricanes and Spitfires when none should have survived, had been wiped clean. Now the real battle was about to begin – and surely nothing on earth, or in the air, could prevail against this massive destructive power….
Oberleutnant Ferdy Goetz, 109 pilot of I/JG2, and hundreds more commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the Luftwaffe air-crew, shared none of this impression that the past was the past and the real battle was about to begin. For the 109 pilot Goetz, August, and July before that wicked month, had formed in his mind an indelible grey picture of tense waiting, the predictable scramble in loose formation from grass airfields, the crackle of orders on the R/T, becoming more urgent as the English coast was crossed, the everlasting search of the skies, the uneasy winking of the red light warning of low fuel, the impossibly swift arrival and the equally swift departure of enemy fighters – and crammed between the whirl of wings, the chatter of gunfire, the stench of cordite filling the cockpit, the sickening sight of oncoming tracer.
Back at Guines, it was possible to scrub oil from hands, wipe the tracing of goggles and mask from the face, and soak clean a sweat-caked body. But the notion of clearing all this from the fighting experience of weeks and weeks – sometimes three ops in a day – was as ridiculous as bringing back to the dispersal the faces of Hans Moeller or Heinz Blume and all the others who had failed to recross this damnable, untrustworthy, hateful Channel….
The CHL station at Foreness, at the extreme tip of Kent, was the first with the news again. Only seconds later, a WAAF corporal in front of her tube at the Dover CH station confirmed that there was a big build-up over the Pas de Calais. At precisely 3.54 p.m. a track plotter at Bentley Priory reached forward and placed a plot on the big map table. It indicated 20+, but less than a minute later more reports came in from the coastal radar stations, and by 4.16 p.m. visuals from the Observer Corps were reaching the Maidstone centre. It was like the approach of a thunderstorm after a long, hot, summer day.
Park at 11 Group headquarters ordered eleven squadrons into the air. At Kenley, Hendon, North Weald and Northolt, the telephones rang at the dispersals and red Verys formed pretty parabolas, some of them over Hurricanes with engines already running. Trolly-ac. plugs were ripped out and raced to the next machine, blue smoke rose from the Merlin exhausts. A sergeant pilot of 43 Squadron at Tangmere taxied out standing in the cockpit, and others were still clipping their straps as they moved forward fast for take-off. Nos 253, 504, 249, 1 and 303 Squadrons were all airborne by 4.20 p.m.
A few minutes later four more 11 Group squadrons were off on patrol, the Hurricanes from 43 Squadron, John Thompson’s 111 Squadron from Croydon, 79 Squadron’s Hurricanes from Biggin Hill and 501 from Gravesend. Soon the Duxford Wing and other 12 Group squadrons were ordered to scramble.
Goering and his staff may have seen the greatest air armada ever launched as a single mass of aircraft, but within minutes the Gruppen were breaking up and reforming in an immensely complex pattern of separate strikes, each with its unprecedentedly numerous fighter escort, and embarking in stately drill formation over the Channel at different times and from different directions, crossing in anywhere from Beachy Head to Essex. All this elaboration was intended to confuse the 11 Group warning systems, both radar and visual, and the move worked as well as intended:
Throughout the operation enemy tracks were disappearing and reappearing with disconcerting frequency; and to the extent that this narrative is incoherent it only reflects the situation as it appeared to those who were controlling the defence at the time.1
Although 11 Group pilots were puzzled that so much time elapsed before they even sighted any enemy aircraft, this did allow some scrambled squadrons to gain the required height – and, after finding themselves so often below the enemy when contact was made, this altitude was nearly always more than the controller had ordered.
But as the hands of the ops-room clocks moved on minute by minute, the controllers themselves, observing the ever increasing number of plots on the table, and the numerous variations in their direction, like typhoon wind arrows on a weather map, knew that they were facing their most testing hour. As the first contacts were made, the squadron commanders and their pilots were feeling the same way. ‘I’d never seen so many aircraft,’ wrote Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone* of 602 Squadron. ‘It was a hazy sort of day to about 16,000 feet. As we broke through the haze, you could hardly believe it. As far as you could see, there was nothing but German aircraft coming in, wave after wave.’2
Flight Lieutenant James McArthur of 609 Squadron reported that, ‘Whilst on patrol at 10,000 feet between Brooklands and Windsor, we saw about 200 enemy aircraft surrounded by AA fire. We climbed towards them and I led the squadron into a quarter attack….’3 Another pilot, commenting on the sight of a bomber formation which he estimated as twenty miles long, with an escort of fighters above, said simply, ‘It was a breathtaking sight. You couldn’t help feeling you’d never again see anything as remarkable as that.’4
Many of the defending squadrons had been ordered to patrol above the airfields. Day after day these had been the primary target for high-level, low-level, glide- and dive-bombing attacks, and no one airborne that afternoon made any other target assumption. The sector controllers, too, felt no reason to believe that the Luftwaffe’s strategy had made a sudden and dramatic departure from the pattern prevailing for a full month.
The precise moment of truth can only be estimated, but it was probably a few minutes after 5 p.m. on this Saturday afternoon when some of the pilots most closely in touch, the sector commanders and Park himself realised that this was no ordinary series of raids. It was not just in size that the assault was unique, but in objective. It became suddenly evident that the bombing had come to London, and London was the sole target.
As the Medway guns opened fire, the Hurricanes of 501 and 249 Squadrons, outnumbered as usual by more than ten to one, hurled themselves at the bombers, and, as usual, within seconds were in combat with the escort as well.
The formations of Heinkels and Dorniers shuddered at the impact, like the three-deckers of the Dutch wars receiving a full broadside. But the bombing run was scarcely disturbed, and the 250 and 500 kg bombs fell with great accuracy on the Woolwich arsenal, and Harland and Wolff’s works. It was only the first of many waves.
By chance – or mischance – Park had chosen this afternoon to visit Dowding at Bentley Priory. There is little likelihood that the redeployment of squadrons would have been any swifter if he had been at the Uxbridge ops room, for his subordinates were skilful and experienced. But it was galling for the Air Marshal to be in the Fighter Command ops room with his superior at this critical time, without the executive power to which he was accustomed.
But Park, with Dowding at his side, saw in miniature replica from the raised dais above the plotting table this first wave turning north over east London, and then assuming an easterly course out towards the North Sea.
This was the danger time for the bombers, the difficult withdrawal, with all 11 and 12 Groups alerted and the 109s gone home for lack of fuel. The rearguard was already being attacked by 603 Squadron and the Hendon squadrons, 1 and 303 (Polish), being in the ideal position to open hostilities, with superior height and the sun behind them. The formations had already been partly broken up by anti-aircraft fire, according to pilots’ reports, and 303 tore into them with all their fearlessness and ferocity. Within a few minutes they had claimed eleven destroyed.
The three squadrons – 19, 66 and 242 – which became known under Douglas Bader’s leadership as the Duxford Wing, and 73 Squadron from North Weald, picked up the bombers after this mauling, as the enemy turned south for home. In the fierce fighting that followed, much of it with the 110 escort, eighteen more of the enemy were claimed. Last to join in, before the survivors of this first wave streaked across the Kent countryside, was 73 Squadron.
Combats as satisfactory in outcome as these [though the figures were greatly exaggerated] cannot be ignored. But the fact remains not only that they were with enemy formations which had dropped their bombs, but that bomb-carrying formations were bombing London or approaching to bomb it while one-third of the fighter forces were thus engaged.5
Now, with the implacability of storm rollers breaking on a beach, successive following waves of between twenty and sixty bombers were boring north at around 20,000 feet, swarms of 109s above each. And there could no longer be any doubt of their destination.
Flying Officer George Barclay (of the banking family), aged twenty, took off in his Hurricane with the rest of B Flight 249 Squadron from North Weald. They had been ordered to patrol Maidstone at 15,000 feet, and they were there at the right time at the right place. The squadron had just been equipped with new VHF radios, and to Barclay’s fury his had not worked. It was OK now though, and he heard the controller calling, ‘Hullo, Ganer leader. Hullo Ganer leader, bandits on your right – over.’
‘We turned towards them. I turned the gun-button to “fire” and looked to see that the reflector sight was working OK. I opened the hood, and immediately I could see fifty per cent better, though it was fifty per cent colder. I saw that the rapidly closing bombers were surrounded by black dots, which I knew to be Me 109s. So we were in for it this time!’6
In the fight that followed the Dornier bombers suffered casualties, but Barclay became separated from the rest of his squadron. ‘As I broke off I turned and two yellow Me 109s shot past beneath me. I turned back and fired at the nearest – no result. Had a burst at the farthest and immediately there was a puff of black smoke, a brilliant flame and down he went, slowly turning over on his back. The whole hood and perspex flew off and the fuselage began to disintegrate….’
Seconds later Barclay was hit and his engine went ‘dead as a gatepost’. He crash-landed in a field only four miles from North Weald and got back in an army lorry just after the last of his squadron – what was left of it – landed. Only seven out of twelve made it back.
Of the German commanders in that Saturday afternoon battle Oberst Johannes Fink was by far the oldest at forty-eight years. He was quite fearless, uniquely experienced, deeply religious and loved by his men, even if his stock injunction before every operation was, ‘You must make your wills.’7 He led Kampfgeschwader 2 over the English coast at 5.30 p.m. at 12,000 feet. The leader of II Gruppe, Paul Weitkus, reported that, ‘Right from the French coast, on the way in, we could see the vast columns of smoke from the burning oil tanks.’ These were the Thameshaven tanks, bombed the previous day, burning more fiercely than ever now after further bombing.
The first fighter attacks, scattered and perfunctory, occurred soon after they crossed the English coast, and continued north towards the North Downs and the silver-grey smudge of the balloon barrages ahead. The escort had no trouble in dealing with these fighters, and the Dornier crews claimed they saw several of the enemy go down. Then, over Sevenoaks, the 109s, which had been extravagant with their fuel in combat, turned back for the Pas de Calais and Fink’s Kampfgeschwader continued alone towards London’s docklands.
Weitkus took his Gruppe over the India Docks, which they bombed in unison on his bomb-aimer’s signal. With his own Leica, fitted with telephoto lens, the leader took some photographs to prove his claim. Kampfgeschwader 2 then
turned away Gruppe by Gruppe, not much bothered by the AA fire. When occasionally, a stray shell splinter thumped against the belly of a bomber, the crew yelled, ‘Come in!’ Weitkus could make out the gun positions around London – the battery positions, that is, not the individual guns. Then, with bombs gone and streaking for home, they met the first furious attacks by full fighter squadrons – the defenders had reacted in strength at last.8
The wills of only four of Fink’s men – the crew of a single Dornier – were resorted to that evening. Another of his Dorniers was damaged and two of the crew wounded. But that was all. It had been a successful day. Only thirteen bombers in all in that giant armada, which Goering waved off after lunch, had failed to return or crashed fatally on French soil. The Reichsmarschall was, for once, thoroughly satisfied when he heard of the devastation and immense fires raging in London. Later he telegraphed his wife to tell her a great victory was imminent. ‘The English have had enough!’
The 109s had done their work valiantly, and Goering had reason to be pleased with them, too. But they had paid a heavy price. Among the dead was Ferdy Goetz. His 109 was seen losing height in a long glide, trailing smoke, over the Weald of Kent. He may already have been dead when a group of soldiers near Elham got the fighter within range and hastened its end with their .303 Lee-Enfields. It crashed in the grounds of St Radegund’s Abbey.
At Tunbridge Wells station at about the same time Harold Nicolson was changing trains when he saw two captured airmen,
handcuffed together and guarded by three soldiers with fixed bayonets. They shuffle along sadly, one being without his boots, shuffling in thick grey socks. One of them just looks broken down and saturnine; the other has a superior half-smile on his face, as if thinking ‘My Fuehrer will pay them out for this.’ The people on the platform are extraordinarily decent. They just glance at them and then turn their heads away, not wishing to stare….9
The effect of the bombing on London’s East End and dockland was devastating. Street after street of slumland property collapsed with scarcely a house escaping in some terraces. There were bombs else-where too, but (as it was to be over the next months) it was the poor who took by far the worst beating. Nearly 450 people were blown up or killed in the wreckage, and many more were injured. Smoke from burning warehouses and ships filled the sky, blotting out the sun.
London, the first city to be subjected to all-out air attack yet remain unsubdued, paid the first instalment of a terrible toll on that hot September afternoon. Fate struck with cruel inconsistency. Some citizens had remarkable escapes when their houses collapsed about their ears; others fell dead in the street from a piece of falling shrapnel. It was the same in the air above. How else could that brilliant and seasoned campaigner, Caesar Hull, have been struck out of the sky by 109s over the Thames Estuary? Or Dick Reynell, who as Hawker’s test pilot knew more about the Hurricane even than Caesar? James McArthur’s 609 Squadron flew all the way from Middle Wallop to catch the German bomber stream, knocking down two Dorniers and (much more difficult) two 110s and a 109, without injury or damage to themselves. One squadron claimed ten ‘kills’ over Essex at the cost of four Hurricanes, all the pilots surviving.
The people of London now, as well as the people of Sussex and Surrey, Essex and Kent, who had looked up into the clear late afternoon sky on that day, had watched the careless tracing of fine lines that broke unpredictably into circles – the one marking pursuit, the second tight and desperate combat. The sound of the machine-gun fire had been like the continuous distant ripping of calico, broken by the more deliberate and deadlier thud-thud of German cannon fire.
Much of the fighting had been above 15,000 feet and with the naked eye the fighters were scarcely visible; it was only when a Hurricane or Messerschmitt came spiralling or plunging down, sometimes in a funeral pyre of smoke and flame, that the material evidence of battle presented itself.
George Barclay’s squadron had lost yet another Hurricane on a second op., and at the end of the day he recorded, ‘The odds today have been unbelievable and we are all really shaken!’10
* * *
Less than two hours elapsed between the landing of the survivors of Barclay’s squadron, and others in 11 and 12 Groups, and the approach from the south of the first night raiders. It was certainly not a long enough interval to allow the fire services, striving to get under control the gigantic fires among the warehouses and ships of dockland, to complete their work. In fact, darkness had not yet set in when the Heinkels with their characteristic unsynchronised throb crossed the coast just west of Beachy Head at 8.22 p.m. at 15,000 feet. Unescorted as they were, they would have been ripe game for fighter attack, but for some inexplicable reason the only single-engined fighters that were scrambled were two Hurricanes from 213 Squadron at Tangmere, which simply patrolled their sector station and did not attempt to intercept.
As the stream of bombers, almost entirely from Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, became more numerous, two Blenheims took off from Martlesham, and a Blenheim and Beaufighter from the Fighter Interception Unit also patrolled. ‘Numerous AI contacts were obtained,’ they reported, ‘but constant interference from undirected AA fire and searchlights prevented success.’ Meanwhile, at Hornchurch, ironically, the drifting smoke from the docks, which the night fighters were supposed to prevent spreading, was so thick that 600 Squadron’s Blenheims could not get off the ground.
As for the guns, many of these had been redeployed for airfield and aircraft factory defence, and the 120 guns in the Thames and Medway area could not engage because the bulk of the bombers operated too far to the west. However, the relatively few guns available, all within the Inner Artillery Zone, fired away between 9.05 p.m. and 3 a.m. It was not much comfort for the people of London to learn the next day that one bomber had been brought down, when they recalled that what seemed to be many hundreds had made their life hell until the early hours. This night’s work, then, for the German aircrews was what their enemy called ‘a piece of cake’. More than ninety per cent of their bombs – about 333 tons of high explosive and 13,000 incendiaries – had landed in the built-up London area.
London was to suffer worse nights than this, but for a population poised for so long in expectation of catastrophe of Wellsian proportions, it came as a savage shock. The night bombing had not been so limited to the docks and East End as the day attacks, and all over the centre of London fires raged, roads were blocked, three main line railway stations put out of action entirely while sixteen more stations were hit and damaged. The Rotherhithe tunnel had been blocked, like countless streets in the West End as well as the City and the East, where the entire surviving population of Silvertown, surrounded by raging infernos, had to be evacuated by water.
Ivan Maisky, the ambassador representing the Soviet Union, for the present Germany’s inactive ally, had as alarming a night as everyone else. ‘Exactly at 9 p.m.’, he noted, ‘there began high in the darkened sky a kind of strange and unaccustomed roar. It seemed as though a multitude of enormous birds was circling in the sky, each of them giving out a protracted howling and piercing sound. At once it was frightening and revolting. Then dull blows could be heard. We went up to the top floor of the Embassy building, and saw from there how there were, shooting up in various places, high tongues of flame.’11 In a few months’ time, the cities of his own country would be experiencing worse ordeals than this.
At the time there were very few who believed that the ordeal of the airfields had ended, that the day and night bombing of London when the defences were so gravely worn down marked a radical and permanent change of strategy by the Luftwaffe. For the Luftwaffe, and the citizens of London (especially the working people in the East End), 7 September appeared to be a day and night of German success. For Dowding and Park it was a day of immense relief and growing conviction that Fighter Command would prevail.
Meanwhile, events connected with the threatened invasion now appeared to be approaching their expected climax. At the end of August the barges, steamers, tugs, trawlers and motor-boats which the Germans had been requisitioning since 19 July had begun to move along inland and coastal waters towards the invasion ports. Until then the British Combined Intelligence Committee had seen no sign that the German preparations were well advanced and had thought an attack on the east coast more likely than one across the Channel. But from 31 August Hudsons and the high-flying Spitfires of Coastal Command’s Photographic Reconnaissance Unit had picked up a sudden increase in activity along the Dutch canals and coast. Daily the RAF cameras had recorded the growing concentrations: no barges in Ostend on 28 August, 18 on 31 August, 70 on 2 September, 115 on 5 September, 205 on 6 September. At Flushing, Dunkirk and Calais it had been much the same story. Its implications were reinforced by photographs of new gun emplacements and dive-bomber concentrations in the Pas de Calais and by Enigma intercepts indicating reinforcements of Kesselring’s bombers. The threat from across the Channel, for weeks feared but uncertain, was suddenly all too real.
On 5 September Bomber Command made its first major attack on the invasion ports. The following day all RAF units were placed under Alert No. 2 – ‘Attack probable within the next three days’. Twenty-four hours later, on that fateful Saturday afternoon of 7 September, the Chiefs of Staff met in Downing Street. General Brooke, keeping a diary for the benefit of his wife – a practice which, if known, would have horrified his colleagues – wrote at the end of the day: ‘All reports look like invasion getting nearer. Ships collecting, dive-bombers being concentrated, parachutists captured….’12
In the light of all the indications, the Chiefs of Staff, meeting just as the first German bombs crashed down on Woolwich, decided that the possibility of invasion had become imminent and that the defences should stand by at immediate notice. The Navy and the RAF were already at sufficient readiness, but the Army movements needed eight hours’ notice. That evening, at 8.07 p.m. Home Forces headquarters issued to Southern Command, Eastern Command, the London region and two corps in GHQ reserve the code-word ‘Cromwell’ – all troops to battle stations.
It was a night to remember in the countryside, as well as in bomb-torn London. There was uncertainty as to the full implications of the code-word, and whether it should be acted upon forthwith. In the prevailing tension a few bridges were blown, and the Home Guard, not meant to be generally involved, was in some places called out by the ringing of church bells – the signal reserved for invasion or at least a large parachute landing. Confusion abounded. But, according to Churchill later, the night’s work ‘served as a useful tonic and rehearsal for all concerned’.13
* Later Air Vice-Marshal A. V. R. Johnstone CB, DFC, AE.
