OCTOBER
The last month of the Battle was marked by the variable autumn weather, the closing in of the daylight hours, new Luftwaffe tactics and the appearance of a new variant of that most deadly German air weapon, the Me 109.
Like previous periods of high endeavour and maximum German effort, the fighting of 30 September was followed by days of rain and low cloud which restricted flying to individual attacks by darting Ju 88s. One of the most successful of these was on the de Havilland works at Hatfield, where final preparations were being made to put into production the remarkable ‘wooden wonder’, the multi-purpose, twin-engined Mosquito. From ultra-low level this Junkers tossed four 250 kg bombs into one of the buildings, which unfortunately contained most of the material intended for the production of this aircraft, also killing or gravely injuring almost 100 of the staff.
In spite of the unfavourable weather, a new form of German mass attack quickly became evident. This was carried out, in part, by the new 109E7 and E4/N, both powered by an uprated engine, the first having attachment points for a long-range tank (at last!) while both new variants could carry a single 250 kg bomb. On most days during this month these 109s came over from the Pas de Calais very fast and very high, sometimes in a more or less continuous stream. The single bomb was dropped flying straight and level on a hit or miss basis. In the greater London area, which at first most of these ‘snappers’ reached without serious trouble, there was more hit than miss about this arbitrary bombardment, which killed or maimed many civilians: at Piccadilly Circus on 12 October, or Waterloo Station on the 15th, for example.
Park‘s new problem was to intercept these raids before they reached the capital, for even an immediate response to the first CH warnings scarcely allowed the defending fighters time to reach the average 25,000–33,000 feet at which the bomb-carrying and straight fighter 109s came over.* Only his Spitfires could reach this altitude, and they numbered only about one-third of his force.
The pressure on 11 Group’s Spitfire squadrons again intensified as a result of these new tactics, and pilots began to feel something of the same strain as in late August and early September. In some respects the stress was even greater because of the very high altitudes at which they were patrolling, where they were constantly on oxygen and suffering very low temperatures. ‘The mud on my flying boots froze them to the rudder bar,’ complained one pilot. The CO of 602 Squadron later recalled: ‘We were still going up every day, several times a day. We were still on high alert. We were doing two, three, sometimes four sorties a day. People were coming back and falling asleep, sometimes on the floor at dispersal, or sitting upright in a chair. We were that tired.’1
And 501’s CO, Harry Hogan, said, ‘In fair weather they still came over two or three times a day. A formation of fifty 109s could draw up practically the whole of our available force.’2
On several days the number of 109 sorties well exceeded 1,000, more than during those earlier deadly days of maximum effort. But at least Fighter Command had had time to build up its numbers and squadron-train the new pilots, so that it was markedly stronger than at the crisis of the Battle and better equipped to take the strain.
On 4 October, Park issued new observations and instructions to sector controllers and to squadron commanders, whose pilots were becoming fretful at the frequency with which they were still at an unfavourable height when they met the enemy. Park assured them:
I wish the squadron commanders and sector controllers to know everything humanly possible is being done by group to increase the warning received of incoming raids…. With the prevailing cloudy skies and inaccurate heights given by the RDF the group controllers’ most difficult problem is to know the height of the incoming enemy raids.
Park then detailed what steps were being taken to correct this situation, including the formation of the special reconnaissance flight at Gravesend. He exhorted his controllers:
Whenever time permits I wish [you] to get the readiness squadrons in company over sector aerodromes, Spitfires 25,000 feet, Hurricanes 20,000 feet, and wait until they report they are in good position before sending them to patrol lines or to intercept raids having a good track in fairly clear weather.
Four days later, Park was forced to institute standing patrols, at first of one squadron, later of two, in his effort to deal with the high-flying raiders. By the end of the month these patrols were virtually continuous in daylight hours, covering Biggin Hill–Maidstone–Gravesend. Though in some ways a reversion to older, costlier methods, they improved the rate of interception; in fact, as the month wore on few of the British squadrons were able to intercept unless they were already on patrol, or at least at ‘stand-by’.
To add to the difficulties at Uxbridge, and by contrast with the very high-level, fighter-bomber raids, Erpro 210 made its inevitable re-entry on 5 October in weather that was still poor. Its target was the newly completed airfield at West Mailing, and the Polish pilots of 303 Squadron were offered the opportunity of dealing with the bomb-carrying Me 11 os. They seized it eagerly and got in among the enemy during and after the bombing. It was almost a repeat of 111 Squadron’s attack on this same specialist unit after the Croydon bombing. Four of the 110 crews, including yet another new commander, were shot down and killed and two more of the fighter-bombers crash-landed with wounded crews in the Pas de Calais.
To set against this Polish success, 607 Squadron from Tangmere were bounced by 109s over Swanage and four of their Spitfires were shot down, all the pilots escaping unhurt. Six 109s in all were shot down on a day of drizzle and low cloud, but this figure was achieved at the price of 1,175 Fighter Command sorties – a record.
Two days later, 7 October, an Ulsterman, Pilot Officer Kenneth Mackenzie, demonstrated that not all new pilots needed careful working up to operational standard. On one of his first ops, he shared in the destruction of a 109, exhausting his ammunition in doing so. Then, in full view of the people of Folkestone, he chased another 109 out to sea, battering away at its tailplate with his wingtip until it spun in.
Mackenzie, who was later credited with a score of fourteen and a half, managed to get back to the coast where he crash-landed his sorely damaged Hurricane. ‘He was found on the cliff tops above Folkestone bleeding from a nasty gash under his bottom lip and with some of his teeth knocked out.’3 A doctor put some stitches in the mouth of this pilot, who was then invited to take tea with a local retired admiral.
Earlier in the Battle, tea was also offered to Dickie Turley-George of 54 Squadron after he had crash-landed in a cornfield, which had so upset the farmer. ‘I gratefully accepted and was taken to a delightful Kentish farmhouse and given lashings of strawberries and cream and scones and butter…. I arrived back at Manston to be severely castigated by James Leathart…. “Christ, the war doesn’t stop so that T-G can have a cream tea just because he happens to have been idiot enough to get himself shot down.”’
But, instead of a rocket, Mackenzie received an immediate DFC after his tea party.
In the hectic if comparatively small-scale fighting of the following day, 8 October, the Czech pilot serving with 303, Sergeant Josef Frantisek DFM, Virtuti Militari, went missing somewhere over Sussex. With seventeen credited victories, all obtained in the month of September, he was one of the top-scorers of all pilots.
The sum total of the debt owed to Josef Frantisek, and to the hundreds more RAF aircrew who gave their lives in the Battle, was being drawn up in Berlin as this brave and skilful pilot fell from the sky, although no one on this side of the Channel had any knowledge of it. Four days later, on 12 October, Hitler ordered Keitel to circulate this directive:
The Fuehrer has decided that from now until the spring, preparations for ‘Sealion’ shall be continued solely for the purpose of maintaining political and military pressure on England.
Should the invasion be reconsidered in the spring or early summer of 1941, orders for a renewal of operational readiness will be issued later. In the meantime military conditions for a later invasion are to be improved.4
The interpretation of these words was plain to all who read them. The Luftwaffe had been rebuffed in its sustained and massive attempt to destroy RAF Fighter Command. Where the air forces of Poland and France, and the less powerful victims of Nazi aggression, had been knocked out within days, the RAF, substantially reinforced by men like Frantisek, remained undefeated after three months of fighting. The Battle of Britain had, indeed, been won.
* * *
No orders had been issued at the same time by the German High Command for the fighting to cease after this directive of Hitler’s, and in the event Kesselring and Sperrle continued to send over variable numbers of raids until the end of the month (the official British date for the end of the Battle) and well into November, as if the habit could not be broken. For example, 14 and 15 October were, on a diminished scale, comparable with 14 and 15 August, with 11 Group hard at work all day dealing with the high-flying Me 109s, both fighters and fighter-bombers, while single Ju 88s and occasionally Dorniers took advantage of low cloud to navigate to, and bomb, airfields, killing a number of personnel and inflicting some damage.
But nothing serious was achieved and these raids could only be likened to the calls of defiance and ineffectual thrusts of a one-time champion defeated in the ring. Moreover, the changing season and light were more and more limiting flying, thick fog on a number of days prohibiting all operations on both sides of the Channel, or catching out those who attempted to do so. Four pilots of 302 (Polish) Squadron were killed on 18 October while attempting a forced landing on Sandown Park racecourse, and the casualty lists for both the Luftwaffe and Fighter Command included many more who lost their lives in the bad weather or crashed their machines while taxiing. On the same day that the Poles were tragically killed, no fewer than nineteen Luftwaffe aircraft were damaged or written off in crashes.
There remained one last day of the Battle for the RAF to demonstrate that they were still masters of the air over Britain and had overcome even the new German tactics, the pin-pricking, high-flying, German fighter-bombers.
The 29th of October was a typically misty and cool autumn day, the sun breaking through only hazily. The Battle had spanned the farming season, from ripening crops in early July, when crash-landing aircraft cut swathes through the corn. Now the fields below were dark from ploughing or ochre with stubble, the fruit orchards still dark green.
But on this morning, at around 10.45 when the first Spitfire squadrons scrambled, the patchwork below soon lost its definition. At 20,000 feet horizontal visibility was excellent, offering early sight of a Gruppe of Me 109s crossing the coast at Deal. A single Staffel of fighter-bombers streaked for London, while two more Staffeln fought it out with the Spitfires. Two of the bombers got through and apparently chose Charing Cross railway bridge as their target, though their two 250 kg bombs landed instead close to the station. Five out of thirty of this Gruppe were shot down, while a sixth crash-landed on the other side of the Channel.
The next waves of ‘snappers’ fared even worse. After so many contacts which opened with Merlins striving for altitude, Park had his Hurricanes at 22,000 feet and his Spitfires at 28,000 (and up-sun at that) when they sighted what looked like a plague of locusts crossing the coast. The four Hurricane squadrons tore into the flanks of the bomb-carriers, while no fewer than five Spitfire squadrons fell out of the sun on to the 100+ 109s of JG51.
Both fighters and fighter-bombers were bounced at a hopeless disadvantage, the bombers jettisoning their loads and racing away to the Channel and safety, leaving several of their number as smoking pyres among the fields far below. The fighters suffered a worse fate, eleven of their number falling to the Spitfires’ eight Brownings, five of them to 602 Squadron.
Two more 109 pilots of JG51 and 52 were rescued from the sea by the extremely efficient air-sea rescue service, but most of the others, including the adjutant of I/JG51, were killed.
On this day, too, Erpro 210’s finale was as spectacular as all the other acts this remarkable body of airmen had played throughout the Battle. Led now by Otto Hintze, the 110s, accompanied this time by some bomb-carrying 109s, headed for North Weald. They arrived safely just as the Hurricanes of 249 and 257 Squadrons were taking off, and destroyed two of their number before they could get clear. A good deal of damage was done in this low-level attack and some twenty personnel were killed, but once again the Erpro paid the price. Hintze was shot down, although he baled out successfully and was made prisoner.
Because 29 October was effectively the last day within the official limits of the Battle, activity on 30 and 31 October being almost nil because of the weather, the final raid of the day had about it a touch of opéra bouffe. Stung by Bomber Command’s raids on northern Italian cities, Mussolini had persuaded a reluctant Goering to allow a contin-gent of bombers and CR42 fighters to operate against Britain. Just as the Italian armies had invaded France when she was already beaten, so now the Regia Aeronautica belatedly participated in the last raid of the Battle of Britain.
A group of fifteen bombers of unfamiliar configuration but faintly similar to He 111s was sighted crossing the Kent coast at a relatively low level as if performing for the Italian equivalent of the Hendon airshow, in formation wing tip to wing tip. Accompanying them in equally immaculate order were some seventy biplanes apparently left over from the last war – open cockpit, single-seat machines with fixed undercarriage. All the aircraft were gaily painted pale green and bright blue, camouflage for a more exotic climate than Britain’s in late October.
The anti-aircraft gunners were as puzzled as everyone else by this strange sight in the sky, and it was a few minutes before fire was opened. The Italian armada then turned right in one formation, content to have over-flown enemy soil in order to provide the Milan newspapers with appropriate propaganda, and departed over Ramsgate – upon which a few bombs were scattered.
Two weeks later, on 11 November (the same day half the Italian battle fleet was knocked out at Taranto by British naval aircraft) the Regia Aeronautica attempted another raid in similar force, this time against Harwich. Some thirteen bombers and CR42 biplane fighters were shot down. Evidence from bomber wreckage revealed an extraordinarily large crew of six, all wearing tin hats and armed with rifles and bayonets. As for the fighters, Churchill wrote, –They might have found better employment defending their fleet at Taranto.’5
For Hitler now it was simply a question of keeping up the pressure on Britain until 1941, when invasion would again become possible -perhaps before the defeat of Russia but probably after. The fighter-bomber raids meanwhile could do no more than keep Fighter Command at stretch, and with worsening weather and shorter hours of daylight they were becoming barely profitable. More and more the Luftwaffe turned to the night bombing which it had practised in a minor way since June, and intensively since 7 September. London overwhelmingly – more than 7,000 tons of bombs during October – but also Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and other places suffered in these October weeks from bombing which normally had specific aiming points, but was in practice indiscriminate. By the end of the month, over 13,000 British civilians had been killed and nearly 20,000 seriously injured in these attacks, which were to continue without respite until May 1941, when most of the Luftwaffe moved east in preparation for the onslaught against Russia.
The ordeal was grievous, but in the context of the strategic progress of the war, almost immaterial. Thanks to the victory in the daylight Battle during July-October, the island base remained unconquered, and soon Hitler would have created for himself situations beyond redemption even by the might and courage of the German Army and the Luftwaffe.
* Performance and ceiling of the Me 109 while carrying a 250 kg bomb was markedly inferior to that of the pure fighter – which it became again on relief of the weight and resistance.