As we have seen, many elements came together to create the miracle of deliverance. Some had more effect than others, but all played their part. The counter-attack at Arras; the several halt orders; Gort’s decision to evacuate; the defence of the corridor’s strongpoints and the perimeter around Dunkirk; the calm sea, cloud cover and smoke over the harbour; the degaussing of ships; Tennant’s discovery that the mole could be used to load troops; Churchill’s refusal to consider making peace; the efforts of the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy; the valuable work of the Little Ships – all of these factors together create our story. But another crucial factor has not yet been explored: the performance of the Royal Air Force.
Strafed and bombed by the Luftwaffe, soldiers on the beaches and the mole were often heard to ask, ‘Where’s the bloody RAF?’ They carried on asking once they had returned to England. But the RAF was in France and its aircraft were parked up on French airfields long before this question first arose. RAF light bomber and fighter squadrons were sent out as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force, a joint French and British organisation that had been created in anticipation of war. ‘We went out as soon as we could in September,’ says Billy Drake of 1 Squadron. ‘We flew across in our aircraft. All the ground transport went by sea.’ His first job as a pilot was to ensure that the troop ships were protected as they crossed to France.
Life was quiet at first. Drake was stationed on an airfield that his squadron shared with a nunnery. His mess was in Le Havre – where things were racier. ‘We took over a brothel,’ he says, ‘and two of the girls stayed on as waitresses to look after us.’ And as the BEF dug trenches and settled down to its strange holiday, the RAF, too, had little to do – mainly haphazard reconnaissance. ‘We had no early warning,’ says Drake. Most operational sorties were carried out in response to the noise of enemy aircraft. ‘Our activity consisted of endless patrols,’ says Roland Beamont of 87 Squadron, ‘and there was no radar to help. It was just a question of eyeballs.’
There was confusion in London, meanwhile, about German intentions. Was the Luftwaffe going to come for the capital? And if it did, would anybody survive? This was no foregone conclusion. In 1932, Stanley Baldwin had told the House of Commons, ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’ In fact, believed Baldwin, it was going to wipe out European civilisation. Harold Macmillan, writing in 1956, explained that the pre-war generation thought of air warfare ‘rather as people think of nuclear war today’.
So as Britain steeled itself for a catastrophic bombing campaign, many wondered why the Royal Air Force was not pre-empting Hitler by bombing Germany first. ‘We in Britain had organised a Bomber Command,’ wrote the aerial commentator J. M. Spaight. ‘The whole raison d’être of that Command was to bomb Germany . . . We were not bombing her. What, then, was the use of Bomber Command? Its position was almost a ridiculous one.’
Other voices urged caution; there was no need to initiate an unnecessary fight. But why, Winston Churchill asked in January, did the Germans not attack? Perhaps they were apprehensive of starting a war they could not be sure of winning, or perhaps they were ‘saving up for some orgy of frightfulness which will soon come’.
On the morning of 10 May, the orgy arrived. The Luftwaffe appeared over France. The night before, Joe Pengelly, an NCO at the RAF Forward Air Ammunition Park in Reims, was having a relaxing evening at an Ensa concert.* He got back late and fell asleep in his clothes. Woken at dawn by the sound of explosions, he went to the door and looked out. ‘It was a German aircraft,’ he says. ‘I went to the Lewis guns and started blasting away.’ Roland Beamont’s airfield came under low-level attack that morning, while for Billy Drake, 10 May brought a dramatic change of pace – but no information. ‘All that our HQ could say was take off and patrol such and such an area. I was bloody frightened,’ he says, before correcting himself: ‘No, I was apprehensive.’ For Beamont, that day marked the beginning of a ten-day battle. ‘Eighty-seven Squadron were in the thick of it,’ he says, ‘until we were pulled out on 20 May because we hadn’t enough aeroplanes or pilots to carry on.’
The Royal Air Force was still flying some almost obsolete planes – such as the Hawker Hector, an army cooperation biplane in the process of being phased out. (Any that were left after Dunkirk, however battered, were sold to neutral Ireland.) The enchanting-sounding Fairey Battle was a light bomber introduced in 1937, but already outclassed by 1940. Like the Spitfire and Hurricane, it had a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, but it also carried a bomb load and a three-man crew. In combat against the Luftwaffe, it was slow and vulnerable. Vivien Snell, a Fairey Battle pilot of 103 Squadron who bombed the bridges across the River Meuse in a vain effort to prevent the German advance, was no fan of his aircraft: ‘It was unmanoeuvrable and had one .303 machine gun firing rearwards. It was kamikaze. Our losses were huge.’ The Fairey Battle was withdrawn completely by the end of 1940.
Through a combination of surprise and superior machines, the Luftwaffe overwhelmed the RAF in these opening days, in the air and on the ground, where they targeted aircraft on airfields. The pressure on pilots became enormous. Beamont says his squadron of Hurricanes was on continuous patrol, such that ‘people were just not able to write up reports – there was too much action’. His squadron’s losses were heavy and its records were lost in the move from one base to another. ‘It was difficult to know what was happening,’ he says.
In the meantime, a sense that German pilots did not play by the rules was growing among their British counterparts. Beamont witnessed deliberate German attacks on civilians. ‘If you jam the roads with refugees and overturned vehicles and slaughtered horses,’ he says, ‘the allied reserves are going to take longer to reach the front.’ Belgian refugees fleeing the invasion remember these aerial attacks. Louis van Leemput, then aged thirteen and escaping with his family, remembers being fired at on more than one occasion, once even after Belgium had surrendered. ‘The war was over!’ he says, still astonished nearly eighty years later. ‘There was a deep ditch nearby and we just had to jump in and the bullets went, “Tuck! Tuck! Tuck!” over the cobblestones. We could have been killed, even in that moment.’
Allied pilots were beginning to hear other disturbing reports. Arriving in Lille, Harold Bird-Wilson of 17 Squadron made a bleak discovery: the Germans were shooting at pilots bailing out. ‘It was obvious that the esprit de corps and the rules of war were going to be very different in comparison with the fighting that took place in World War I,’ he says. He remembers that the pilots were shaken and angered by this and he took it as a warning to protect any parachutists who descended.
By 15 May, the RAF had already lost 250 planes. Sir Hugh Dowding, the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, lost patience and notified Winston Churchill that no more Hurricanes would be going to French airfields. If losses continued at this rate, Dowding feared that Fighter Command would be left unable to defend Britain. It was a decision Churchill struggled to accept. Desperate to keep the French fighting, he overruled Dowding, insisting on four further squadrons being sent out. A shambolic reorganisation resulted, as these new squadrons were created out of eight existing squadrons, with the result that pilots with different training and little mutual understanding were thrown into action together. Sir Cyril Newall, chief of air staff, subsequently ruled that no further squadrons would be sent to France; instead they would move to airfields in the south of England, from where they could make sorties over France.
Neither Churchill nor the French leaders were pleased with this decision. In Whitehall, Roland Melville, Newall’s private secretary, was approached by a French liaison officer with a message from General Gamelin: without a further four squadrons being sent immediately, the battle would be lost. Melville told him there would be no more squadrons for France. The officer was clearly desperate so Melville telephoned Newall’s assistant, asking him to reconsider. But the answer, again, was no. ‘I reported it to this man who burst into tears,’ says Melville, ‘and he spent the rest of the night walking up and down the corridors outside my office weeping.’
By resisting requests from the Prime Minister for more fighters to be sent to France, Sir Hugh Dowding shows himself to have been a brave and determined man. Nicknamed ‘Stuffy’ by his men, Dowding cut a very different figure to his flamboyant German counterpart, Hermann Goering. A socially awkward* widower, Stuffy cared deeply for his men, and they respected him back. He often referred to his airmen, including his son Derek, as his ‘chicks’. Goering could be energetic, inspiring even, but he was significantly less paternal. In persuading Hitler to allow the Luftwaffe to finish off the BEF* against the advice of his senior commanders, he placed personal ambition above the welfare of his men. Both Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, commander of Fliegerkorps VIII, and Albert Kesselring, commander of Luftflotte 2, objected. Kesselring complained that many of his gruppe were now heavily reduced in strength, and his bombers were still operating from Germany, which allowed for only one sortie a day. But Goering would brook no dissent, however sensible. He desired the prestige.
These contrasting men, Dowding and Goering, led the war over Dunkirk, but what of the aircraft at their disposal? Another single-seat British biplane was the Gloster Gladiator. Described by one man as ‘no aircraft to go to war in’, this is precisely what a number of pilots did. James Sanders of 615 Squadron had been flying Hurricanes, but after falling out with a squadron leader, he was placed on Gladiators as punishment. The honorary commanding officer of his squadron was Winston Churchill, who visited the airfield with his wife, Clementine. When Mrs Churchill asked if she could sit in his Gladiator, a flattered Sanders agreed. She eased herself into the seat and began poking the controls, as curious non-flyers frequently do. Churchill, meanwhile, stood in front of the aircraft, looking down the barrels of the machine guns. Sanders did not realise until later that the guns were cocked and ready to fire. Had Mrs Churchill shown just a touch more enthusiasm, she would have removed her husband’s head.
On 23 May, Sanders, now a Gladiator veteran and flight commander, took command of a detachment at Manston airfield in Kent. In the early days of the evacuation, ‘G’-Flight made eight patrols over the Channel, protecting ships, large and small, from attack. Sanders survived this dangerous period, and after the flight was disbanded on 30 May, he was placed back on Hurricanes. Gladiators remained in service, however, defending the Royal Navy Dockyard near Plymouth during the Battle of Britain.
In the years leading up to the war, Dowding oversaw the introduction of the two great heroes of British fighter aviation – the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane. The Spitfire entered service in 1938. A monoplane, single-seat fighter with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, it was loved by pilots for its handling and speed, and by the British public for its distinctive engine note, its elliptical curves and the confidence it inspired. Al Deere, a pilot officer with 54 Squadron who started out on Gladiators, remembers his Spitfire training as basic: ‘You learned the cockpit drill, you read the pilot’s handbook, and it felt right. It looked fragile but it was an amazingly tough aircraft.’
Tough it may have been, but it was also responsive. George Unwin, a sergeant pilot of 19 Squadron, found the Spitfire so sensitive on the controls that he never needed to heave it or force it. ‘You just breathed on it,’ he says. ‘If you wanted to turn, you just moved your hands slowly and she went.’ For James Goodson, an American who flew with 43 Squadron later in the year, piloting the Spitfire ‘was like pulling on a tight pair of jeans’. Against regulations, Goodson would smoke his cigar in the cockpit, and when he dropped his lighter, he would move the stick a fraction of an inch, roll the Spitfire and catch the lighter as it fell from the floor.
For Chris Nolan, the section of the film dealing with the war in the air is ‘all about the Spitfire’:
It’s such a magnificent plane, one of the greatest vehicles ever designed. I went up in a Spitfire myself and the feeling of speed and power is unique. You feel very close to the elements, like you’re in a kite with an amazingly powerful motor. You feel the air rushing past the wings, and when you touch the stick, when you turn it, when you roll it, the responsiveness, its relationship with the atmosphere, is really quite incredible. But the confinement in the small cockpit, being strapped into that. There’s the feeling of power and control but there’s also isolation.
One problem it posed was how to bail out. On 25 May, James Leathart of 54 Squadron (known as ‘Prof’ on account of his academic ability) was over Gravelines and Calais, when fellow pilot Johnny Allen’s Spitfire was hit by anti-aircraft fire. ‘Oh hell, my engine’s packed up,’ Leathart heard Allen say over the R/T. Moments later, with Allen’s plane now on fire, Leathart heard him again: ‘Yippee! There’s a destroyer downstairs. I’m bailing out. But how?’ Allen managed to execute a roll and drop out upside down. Three days later, according to Leathart, Allen showed up in the 54 Squadron mess wearing bits and pieces of naval uniform.
While the Spitfire is the iconic British fighter of the Second World War, the Hawker Hurricane was just as important in the earlier part of the war. More angular and less structurally innovative than the Spitfire (it had a wooden-framed and fabric-covered fuselage as opposed to the Spitfire’s all-metal body), it was nevertheless an extremely agile and impressive aircraft.
Geoffrey Page of 56 Squadron says, ‘The Hurricane was a bulldog and the Spitfire a greyhound. One was a tough working animal, the other a sleek, fast animal.’ He considered the Hurricane easier to fly but lacking the Spitfire’s speed and climb. ‘They were both lovable in different ways,’ he says. In the end, it is safest to say that those who flew Spitfires tended to prefer Spitfires, and those who flew Hurricanes tended to prefer Hurricanes.
Another single-engine aircraft also made an impression during the Dunkirk evacuation: the Boulton Paul Defiant. Its partially rotating gun turret behind the pilot harked back to the Bristol Fighter, one of the most successful aircraft of the First World War – except that the Bristol Fighter also had a forward-facing machine gun. The Defiant had no forward-facing armaments; it was designed to position itself alongside a bomber and shoot it out of the sky. It was never intended to engage in hectic dogfights against Messerschmitts. We will soon discover how it fared.
The most effective German fighter aircraft during the Battle of France and the Dunkirk evacuation was the Messerschmitt Bf 109. A single-seat fighter, it was less tight in the turn than the Spitfire and the Hurricane, but it had one distinct advantage – its fuel injection system. This meant that it could dive faster than either of the British fighters.
The Bf 109’s job was to protect the slow, unwieldy bombers such as the Heinkel He 111, with its distinctive glass nose, and the Dornier Do 17, nicknamed ‘the flying pencil’ for its sleek lines. Both of these were originally introduced as commercial aircraft. But the Heinkel, unlike the Dornier, had been designed to be converted easily into a military plane, at a time when, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was not allowed an air force. The most feared German bomber during this period, as well as the most vulnerable, was, as we have seen, the Junkers Ju 87 (Stuka) bomber.* With its Jericho trumpets sometimes operating and its ability to aim its bombs by aiming the aircraft itself, the Stuka terrorised civilians and soldiers on the ground. Yet it delighted opposition fighter pilots, who viewed it as easy prey.
As the evacuation began on 26 May, it fell to Fighter Command’s 11 Group to combat the German attack on the port, shipping and the Dunkirk perimeter. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park had just sixteen squadrons a day for Dunkirk. But the first meeting between a Spitfire and an Me 109 had already taken place on 23 May. In a patrol early that morning, Francis White, leader of 74 Squadron, shot down an observation aircraft, a Henschel Hs 126. But the Henschel put a bullet in White’s radiator, forcing him to land at Calais Marck aerodrome, which was still in Allied hands.
The Germans were poised to capture Calais, so the RAF launched a rescue mission: a Miles Master (a two-seater, flown by ‘Prof’ Leathart), protected by two Spitfires, was sent to collect White. They all crossed the Channel, and the Master landed at Marck aerodrome to fetch White, while the Spitfires stayed airborne. One, flown by New Zealander Al Deere, maintained a patrol of the airfield, while the other, flown by Johnny Allen, went higher to check for German aircraft. Almost immediately, Allen radioed Deere that he had spotted Messerschmitts. He quickly shot one down and damaged two more, sending them into the clouds streaming smoke. Deere tried to warn the pilots on the ground that Messerschmitts were about but, as the Master had no radio, could only waggle his wings.
As he was doing this, an Me 109 flew directly in front of him, heading towards the Master, causing Leathart and White to run for shelter. Higher up, Allen was now surrounded by 109s, and radioed Deere for help. Deere shot down the 109 directly in front of him before climbing to meet Allen, firing at one Messerschmitt and chasing another away. Once the Master was in the air, all three aircraft headed for home.
Thinking back to the action, Deere has no memory of being afraid. ‘It was the thrill of the thing really. There was no sense of danger at that stage.’ So excited was he that he carried on chasing the final 109 even when he had used up all his ammunition. ‘That shows you how really green I was,’ he says. But the combat gave him confidence, convincing him that there was no reason to fear the 109. He also learned to watch his fuel – a crucial theme in Chris Nolan’s film.
There were skirmishes throughout the day on 26 May, but many British patrols were cancelled due to poor weather. And there were losses due to friendly fire.* John Nicholas remembers: ‘My great friend, Flying Officer Johnny Welford was shot down by a British destroyer and killed, on 26 May off the Goodwin Sands. He bailed out – his parachute streamed but it didn’t open and he was killed. By the time they realised what they had done and dragged him out, it was too late.’
On the same day over Dunkirk, Peter Parrott of 145 Squadron spotted a Heinkel 111 and broke formation to go after it. He started firing and ‘it very rudely shot back’. Parrott realised that the Heinkel’s gunner must have hit his radiator because his cockpit filled with steam. He turned for home and was halfway across the Channel when his squadron caught up with him: ‘There was a lot of chatter on the radio about what was wrong with me. As I got over the coast at Deal, my engine stopped.’ The plane dropped to three or four thousand feet and Parrott tried to find somewhere to land. He saw uneven areas, and people out for their Sunday evening walk, before picking a field and shoving the stick forward. He hit a few sheep, turning them to mutton. People started to gather around the Hurricane, and a policeman showed up. Parrott asked him to keep the crowd away from the loaded guns, and asked where he could find a telephone. A farmer came by on a horse and trap. ‘Who’s gonna pay for them sheep?’ he said to Parrott. ‘Try the Air Ministry,’ said Parrott. The farmer rode off but Parrott still needed a telephone and realised the nearest was the farmer’s. When he reached the farmhouse, the farmer and his wife were having tea and there was a large, juicy ham on the table. Parrott put in a call to Manston airfield and asked to be collected. Then the farmer pointed down the hallway and said, ‘You can sit there!’ Parrott sat on his own. He wasn’t offered any ham.
Living lives of such unpredictability, pilots did what they could to boost morale. A flight commander of 610 Squadron remembers an officer who, having worked at Harrods before the war, called in his contacts. A Harrods van arrived every morning with food and drink for the day; the pilots had fillet steak for lunch, lobster thermidor for dinner, and immense danger between meals. And despite their lack of preparation and experience, pilots seemed eager to see action. When names were drawn from a hat for the honour of making 19 Squadron’s first patrol over Dunkirk, Brian Lane recorded George Unwin’s reaction on being the man left behind: ‘He stood looking at me with a hurt expression on his face, for all the world like a dog who has been told he can’t come for a walk.’ From that day until his death in 2006, Unwin was known as ‘Grumpy’.
The following day, 27 May, the evacuation was fully under way. But only 7,669 British troops left Dunkirk. And in the meantime, despite the pessimism of Goering’s commanders, the campaign began promisingly for the Luftwaffe with the almost complete destruction of the inner harbour.* And though the pilots of Fighter Command were enthusiastic, few had yet seen an enemy plane.
George ‘Grumpy’ Unwin had a surprisingly common experience when he first encountered the enemy: he froze. ‘I just sat there in a turn,’ he says, ‘not petrified, but frozen for about ten to fifteen seconds.’ When enemy gunfire struck his fuselage, the moment was broken – and it never happened to him again. ‘I always regarded the first time you got mixed up as being the most dangerous. One isn’t used to being shot at in any walk of life.’ A sergeant pilot of 222 Squadron found himself admiring Me 109s on his first engagement. ‘They looked so pretty!’ he says. But by the time his moment was broken, the pretty machines had got on his tail and his engine was pouring smoke.
Pilots were learning to ignore official rules and guidelines. They stopped flying in the old First World War Vic formation, for example – with a leader and two wingmen – and instead began copying the German formations learned while flying in the Spanish Civil War and the Polish campaign. In terms of experience – and therefore tactics – the Germans were well ahead of the British.
And it paid to ignore another guideline – concerning height. Pilots were initially told to stay at 20,000 feet, and never to fly lower than 15,000 feet, as the anti-aircraft gunners were supposedly able to take care of enemy planes at lower levels. But this had disadvantages. For one thing, it meant that Stukas were all out of range, as they started their dives at 15,000 feet; for another, it meant that Royal Air Force aircraft were too high to be seen by British soldiers on the ground. These factors led to British aircraft flying lower – even if it meant being shot at regularly by British naval guns.
On 27 May, the Germans’ large formations threatened to outnumber the RAF. ‘The norm was for up to twelve Hurricanes to be attacking 40 to 50 German aeroplanes,’ says Roland Beamont, ‘but sometimes the odds were greater than that.’ The numerous bombers were able to drop hundreds of tons of bombs on the town and the beaches – though many hit the sand where their energy was dissipated and much of their destructive power wasted.
Yet the RAF had considerable success on this day. Thirty German aircraft were lost, and the Boulton Paul Defiants excelled. Early in the morning, they brought down two Me 109s, and on their next patrol, at least another three, possibly five – without loss. German pilots did not yet appreciate the particular danger these aircraft presented with their turret gunners.
The next day, Tuesday 28 May, the bombers of Fliegerkorps I, II and VII were set to work over Dunkirk, protected by the fighters of Jagdfliegerführer 3. On the same day, a message came from the chief of the British air staff warning that the RAF must make ‘their greatest effort’. Fighter Command was instructed to protect the Dunkirk beaches ‘from first light until darkness by continuous fighter patrols’ and, critically, all patrols would be ‘at a strength of at least two squadrons’. The Luftwaffe was about to face its first serious air battle.
Faced with gruppe-sized opponents, the British had little choice but to send up larger units – but this meant that fewer patrols could be made, and longer gaps were left between each. These gaps could be exploited by the Germans. Fighter Command was also facing its first serious challenge.
54 Squadron made a dawn patrol on the morning of 28 May. Spotting a Dornier, Al Deere led the chase. ‘I was firing a burst at him,’ he says, ‘and suddenly I could see return fire from the rear gunner.’ He felt his Spitfire judder and guessed that a bullet had pierced his glycol tank. With his cooling system hit, he couldn’t continue, and had to come down. He crash-landed on the beach. He did, in other words, what the character Farrier does in the film. As Deere made impact with the ground, he was injured, gashing his eyebrow. He had landed wheels up on the water’s edge and the tide was coming in. He wandered up the beach towards a café and looked back to see the tide already rolling in around his Spitfire. A woman in the café helped him with his bleeding eyebrow, sticking it together with plasters.
Deere returned to the beach and took in the chaos he had previously seen from several thousand feet: ‘It was pretty hectic. The bombing, the strafing. We were taking cover.’ And then he noticed something that disturbed him greatly. British gunners were firing at British planes. He tried to intervene but to no avail.
After a while, he made his way to the mole and tried to get on a ship, but an army major stood in his path and told him to get in line. Deere argued he had to get home as quickly as possible to rejoin his squadron. ‘For all the good you chaps seem to be doing over here,’ said the major, ‘you might just as well stay on the ground.’ The major kept Deere off one ship, but the New Zealander managed to board the next – where the atmosphere was no less tense. The soldiers were angry.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ they said.
Deere had been flying for ten days straight. He had nothing to apologise for. ‘We were there but you, perhaps, didn’t see us!’
The soldiers were unpleasant – but Deere managed to stay calm. And he was asked to help with aircraft identification. He came on deck and saw the ships’ guns were firing at British aircraft.
The morning rain gave way to heavy cloud. Because of this, the Luftwaffe was forced to stay inland, targeting the town and port. John Ellis of 610 Squadron remembers carrying out two patrols that day, but visibility was poor and he spotted no enemy. Without the Luftwaffe to worry them, his squadron ‘flew low over the beaches from time to time to give the Army a bit of encouragement and show them we were about’. South African Hilton Haarhoff was the rear gunner in a Lockheed Hudson, a four-man reconnaissance aircraft. His pilot, fellow Springbok Ronald Selley, also tried to instil confidence in the troops, by flying low over the ships. ‘Whenever we did this the troops on the ships would give us a wave and grin as we sped past,’ says Haarhoff, adding that Selley was an exhibitionist who liked to fly closer to the water than any other pilot. His navigator did not like it at all, but skimming so low across the Channel paid off when they spotted an upturned table floating in the Channel with three men on top of it, and managed to guide a trawler towards it.
Having been held up by the weather on 28 May, the Luftwaffe was again hampered by low cloud the following morning. Goering was infuriated but, for all his temporal power, he could not roll back the clouds. An improvement in the weather at midday, however, allowed the Germans to launch consecutive major bombing raids, two of which met with no resistance. This was the day when Crested Eagle, as well as many other ships, was sunk, and the mole was mistakenly abandoned for several hours. So successful was the Luftwaffe on the afternoon of 29 May that its chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, changed his opinion. He now believed that the Luftwaffe could destroy the BEF in its Dunkirk pocket.
For Eric Barwell of 264 Squadron, a Defiant pilot, the war began in earnest on this day. ‘Four Stuka dive bombers were flying along,’ he says, ‘more or less line abreast, and three of us Defiants formatted under the gaps. And they just exploded. They had fuel tanks between the pilot and his navigator – they were easy meat.’ It was an extraordinary day for his squadron. It claimed an astonishing thirty-seven enemy aircraft destroyed. A Hurricane pilot who met the Defiant pilots later that day remembers them as ‘cock-a-hoop’. He pointed out that the Germans had probably mistaken them for Hurricanes, and were unlikely to make the same mistake again. The pilot was right – this sortie marked the height of the Defiants’ success. Once the Germans understood that the Defiant’s turret posed its only danger, it became the easiest of kills for German fighters. It would soon be withdrawn from daylight action to become a night fighter.
The exact figures of how many planes were brought down on 29 May conflict heavily. Over-claiming was inevitable and happened on both sides. But an unacknowledged kill can rankle, even years later. John Nicholas of 65 Squadron came across Messerschmitt 110s in their trademark defensive circle. He fired at one and pulled away to the right, only to see in his rear-view mirror that three had broken out of formation to follow him. ‘I decided the only thing I could do,’ he says, ‘was whip round and go down for the centre one. Which I did.’ He fired at it and at the last minute pulled up, but when he looked back, he couldn’t see any planes at all. He returned to Hornchurch and described the scene to his intelligence officer: ‘But he didn’t give me a combat report.’ In 1992, Nicholas found out that another pilot had been credited with this head-on attack. ‘It irritated me at the time!’ says Nicholas. ‘After a while, I thought, Oh what does it matter, it was fifty years ago!’
For Denys Gillam of 616 Squadron, the main problems of flying over Dunkirk were the limited amount of time he could remain there (a little over half an hour) and the difficulty in chancing on the right altitude to intercept the enemy. An afternoon such as this, when the weather conditions suited the Germans, offers a stark glimpse of what might have happened had good weather lasted for an unbroken week.
On Thursday 30 May, sea mist, fog and smoke from burning Dunkirk meant the Stukas were unable to function once again. By the end of the day, almost 54,000 British troops had made it off the beaches or the mole – the most successful day so far. But this did not mean that British squadrons and pilots were finding the operation easy work. ‘To maintain a standing patrol,’ says Gillam, ‘meant that one was flying two or three times a day – about five hours a day starting in the early morning and going on until dusk.’ And in order to encourage the efforts of men such as Gillam, Lord Gort sent a message of gratitude to the RAF. He said their presence was ‘of first importance in preventing embarkation being interrupted’.
All the same, some could not stand the strain. ‘We had the odd case of pilots proving unsuitable,’ Gillam remembers. ‘We had one that went to pieces on the ground just as he was getting into his aeroplane, so the doctor went and hit this chap on the chin – hard. Knocked him out. He didn’t fly again.’
Friday 31 May was, as we have already seen, the most successful day of the evacuation. Eric Barwell, the successful Defiant pilot, was back over Dunkirk. On his first patrol, he saw a fellow Defiant break up into four pieces after its tail was sliced off by another Defiant. He saw no parachute emerge. He went out again later in the day and found himself surrounded by enemy aircraft. He shot one down, but when he attacked another three Heinkel bombers, his coolant system was hit and the cockpit filled with fumes. Jettisoning his hood, he aimed for home – but it soon became clear that he would have either to bail out or to ditch the Defiant on the water.
There were ships below who could pick him and his gunner up – but Barwell was worried that if they bailed out, they risked drifting away from the ships, possibly into a minefield. He chose to ditch the plane into the sea.
Looking down, Barwell saw fishing boats. He could ditch close by – but, even with his survival at stake, it crossed his mind that the fishing boats would be too smelly. He then spotted two destroyers about half a mile apart and figured that if he hit the water between them, one would probably bother to pick him up.
As he descended he was surprised by how difficult it was to gauge his height over a calm sea – and the next thing he knew he was in the water, trying to swim towards the surface.
Once on top, Barwell spotted his gunner, swam over to him, and discovered he was unconscious. He started to swim to the destroyer, a sort of sidestroke pulling the gunner by his parachute. One of the destroyers, he was delighted to see, was making its way towards him.
When he was near, one of the sailors from the destroyer dived into the water and swept the gunner away from Barwell and brought him on board. Once Barwell reached a climbing net near the stern, he was too weak to pull himself up. But somebody helped, and he was safe.
Barwell soon discovered another miracle – the Defiant pilot whose aircraft had broken up into four pieces was standing on deck. Alive and well. He must have parachuted out so low that Barwell had failed to see him. And, at that moment, Barwell’s gunner regained consciousness.
For a while the gunner had no idea where he was. As he looked up, the first thing he saw was the pilot – whom he thought had died – standing in front of him framed by a deep red glow. He was utterly convinced that he was in hell.
He was thankful to discover, soon afterwards, that he was alive – as was the pilot, who was standing in a doorway that reflected the sunset.
In terms of the film, this is an interesting account; the character Collins ditches into the sea in his Spitfire, tries to break through his canopy with his flare gun, and is freed when the canopy is smashed from the outside. Barwell, in his Defiant, seems to have been thrown clear – which distinguishes his scenario from Collins’s. So, is it really possible that a Spitfire could stay afloat long enough for a pilot to free himself or be freed?
Jack Potter, a sergeant pilot, was on patrol with 19 Squadron on 1 June. When the squadron flew into twelve Me 110s, he set his sights on one – but his ammunition ran out. There was no reason to stay around, so he started for home, before realising that his Spitfire was damaged. About fifteen miles from the English coast, Potter’s engine seized. He figured his chances of being picked up if he bailed out were poor, but ditching in a metal Spitfire was also highly risky. On balance, though, he felt that this was his only chance, and he aimed towards a small boat.
Straightening out to land, Potter undid his Sutton harness, and inflated his life jacket. ‘On first touching the water,’ he says, ‘the machine skimmed off again, and after one more such landing it dug its nose into the sea.’ He stood up in the cockpit and found that the aircraft was still afloat.
The Spitfire stayed afloat for about ten seconds. Potter tried to keep hold of his parachute because he had been told it functioned like a lifebuoy, but it got caught on the sliding hood and as the Spitfire sank he was pulled down. He managed to break free and started to swim up, and was struck by the tailplane as the Spitfire went down.
The little boat he’d spotted was French, the Jolie Mascotte, and its crew spoke no English. They were trying to get to Dunkirk but were lost. Potter helped them to find the right course.* In return, they gave him food, drink and dry clothes.
The fact is, therefore, that a ditched Spitfire stayed afloat long enough for a pilot to free himself, become trapped, free himself again and survive.
Graham Davies, of 222 Squadron, went out on dawn patrol on 31 May, but began to lose height after being hit by anti-aircraft fire. He remembered the advice of a Hurricane pilot that it was possible to land wheels down on Dunkirk beach due to the hard sand. Thinking that he might be able to fix his Spitfire and take off again, Davies landed to the west of Dunkirk, in order to avoid the thousands of troops to the east. But as he came down, he was fired on by the French guns at Fort-Mardyck. He landed safely nevertheless and, after meeting the artillery men who had shelled him, he eventually managed to set fire to his aircraft, and received a lift into Dunkirk.
At the end of the mole, Davies could see a minesweeper and a paddle steamer. German planes were strafing from time to time, and a bomber was dropping its load in the harbour. Dead bodies were lying everywhere. In the midst of this, an angry British soldier was storming back up the mole, furious that the Navy would not let him come aboard a ship with a German prisoner he was frogmarching around.
On the morning of 1 June, the weather cleared. The return of the Stukas en masse coincided with the return of the modern British destroyers. A number of unopposed Luftwaffe attacks were launched in the morning, resulting, as we have seen, in the sinking of HMS Keith as well as a number of other destroyers and naval ships. British soldiers seethed at their apparent lack of protection. Harold Bird-Wilson tells of Ken Manger, a fellow 17 Squadron pilot who bailed out of his Hurricane over the beach. Attempting to board a destroyer, he was bluntly informed by an army officer that ships were not for the Royal Air Force. But Manger, it turned out, was an excellent amateur boxer. He knocked the officer into the sea, and stepped gingerly on board. The following day, Manger was back in the air over Dunkirk.
Arthur Taylor of 13 Squadron received so many threats from soldiers that he hid his uniform. ‘I wore gumboots to cover the lower part of my Air Force uniform,’ he says, ‘and a black oilskin jacket to cover my Air Force jacket.’ Sufficiently disguised, Taylor was evacuated home. Flying Officer Peter Cazenove, meanwhile, who had been forced to land his Spitfire on the beach, was turned away from three different destroyers. ‘The Navy said that all accommodation was reserved for the Army, and the Air Force could go fuck themselves,’ Cazenove’s friend Tony Bartley wrote in a letter to his father. Cazenove was captured and ended up in a POW camp.
There are many reasons why soldiers did not see members of the Royal Air Force. For one thing, the RAF ended up employing large formations which meant gaps were necessary between patrols. For another, the Germans had observers behind Dunkirk who were able to call up attacks. This allowed the Luftwaffe to arrive shortly after the RAF disappeared. Third, the RAF was patrolling inland to cut the Germans off before they could reach the beaches. This makes sense. Once the Luftwaffe was over the beach, it was too late to prevent an attack. Fourth, the RAF was often flying at 20,000 feet or higher. At this height planes simply could not be seen from the ground. And fifth, since British guns were firing at almost every friendly aircraft that flew overhead, nearby soldiers would have mistaken these British aircraft for German machines.
Hilton Haarhoff’s squadron patrolled Dunkirk on the afternoon of 1 June. He noted that the beaches ‘were now nearly deserted, but the sand showed a mass of shell holes and shelter trenches which were hastily dug by our troops’. He was also able to see the line of lorries that had been driven out into the sea to form a jetty for the boats. On their way home, Haarhoff’s Hudson crew witnessed a dogfight between Spitfires and Stukas. The Stukas were attacking ships returning to Dover. Haarhoff saw one Stuka dive, release its bombs and rise again. ‘I looked for his target,’ he says, ‘an inoffensive tug towing a barge loaded with troops.’ A huge wall of water rose up in front of the tug, blotting it from view. ‘I did not expect to see the tug again,’ he remembers, ‘but in less time than it takes to tell, the tug was still steaming forward and the shower of water decreasing as it fell; the gallant little tug was quite unharmed and I gave it a cheer.’
The morning of 2 June started quietly for Fighter Command, with their patrols meeting little resistance. Tony Bartley remembers his squadron dropping to 9,000 feet – against orders – where it encountered thirty Heinkel 111s, destroying about eighteen of them. Even further below, Bartley could see Stukas diving. But the Stukas had not succeeded in thwarting the BEF’s escape. And they had made a liar of their commander-in-chief. It turned out that Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe could not destroy the British Expeditionary Force – whatever he had told Adolf Hitler.
On 2 June, 611 Squadron experienced their first day over Dunkirk. Squadron Leader John McComb remembers they had planned a drinks party for their wives in the mess that day. When the order came through to go to Dunkirk, they decided not to cancel the party, as ‘we could not have Hitler interfering with our drinking habits’. The squadron was about to take off on patrol when one of the pilots, Donald Little, leapt briefly onto the wing of McComb’s aircraft and asked him to feed his dog that night. McComb and his wife shared a cottage with Little and his wife, and another pilot, Ralph Crompton and his wife. ‘That morning,’ remembers McComb, ‘we ran into a cloud of Messerschmitts and got into all sorts of trouble and lost these two young pilots.’ The squadron arrived back in ones and twos. ‘Meantime the party had started, broken with a cheer as someone else turned up. Came the time when Lil Crompton realised with June Little that no more were coming back.’ The two young women asked for no help or support. ‘Without a tear or a word they quietly slipped out of the ante-room and went back to the cottage.’
Over the entire period of the Battle of France and the evacuation, 931 British aircraft (of which 477 were fighters) failed to return from operations, were destroyed on the ground, or were irreparably damaged. Over the same period, 1,526 airmen were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
For the period of the evacuation, the numbers are less precise. 11 Group gives a figure of 258 German aircraft destroyed. The 1953 Official British History offers a figure of 177 British aircraft destroyed or damaged, of which 106 were fighters. Whatever the precise figures, however, it seems clear that the Luftwaffe lost more aircraft during the evacuation than Fighter Command. And while mistakes were made by both sides, they were both severely hamstrung. The British by the fact that many of their aircraft were unavailable to them, the Luftwaffe by the fact that the task thrust upon them by their chief was unrealistic. And both sides were constrained by the battle’s distance from their airfields; they only had limited time in the air.
Ultimately, however, whether or not its task was realistic, the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy the British Expeditionary Force. It had failed in its stated aim for the very first time. And not only that, it failed to make a large dent in the Royal Air Force.
The RAF, on the other hand, had demonstrated that the much-feared Luftwaffe could be nullified. It had gained experience for the great air battle ahead. It had shot down large numbers of the enemy, and, with a great deal of help from the weather, it had protected the British Expeditionary Force. Most importantly – it had not lost.
So we can add, with some confidence, the final great element that contributed to the miracle of deliverance: the performance of the Royal Air Force.