CHAPTER 9
At daybreak on 7 September, Fighter Command prepared for a continuation of the assaults of the past week. The morning was hot, the sky clear and sunny: just the sort of weather dreaded by the wary men of Fighter Command. Pilots and machines waited across 11 Group for the inevitable scramble, but the hours passed in relative calm, the eye of the storm. As midday rolled into the afternoon it appeared that the Luftwaffe might be taking the day off; then, at 4.00p.m., martial storm clouds began gathering in the east. Radar reports indicated that a build-up was under way and squadrons were placed on alert. Seventeen minutes later, eleven squadrons were scrambled. Ten and 12 Groups were placed on readiness.
Watching the massive German force depart was Göring, the corpulent commander of the Luftwaffe, who had arrived recently to take personal command of the operation. From the lofty cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez he stood with Kesselring, admiring the mustering and launching of his forces. The vast fleet of German aircraft numbered close to 1000, an armada never before seen in aerial combat. The twin-engine bombers rose from 14,000 to 20,000 feet and made up a third of the fleet. The remainder, deadly fighters, prowled at higher altitudes. Fighter Command assumed that the force would break apart and head for the sector stations, with ancillary assaults on aircraft industries. Instead it headed straight for the world’s largest city: London.
The move from attacking the airfields to an assault on London was a course first embarked upon back on 24 August when the capital was bombed in error, an act that set in motion a series of tit-for-tat reprisals. When Berliners died under the British bombs four days later, Hitler’s mood turned sour and he directed Göring to plan for an all-out assault on London. Up until this point there had been a general unwritten rule that civilian targets were off-limits. In practice, though, the rudimentary accuracy of the bombers and the proximity of housing to factories, ports and railways usually resulted in some civilian losses. Bomber Command’s continued attacks, small-scale though they were, increasingly infuriated the Führer. On 4 September, to a highly charged audience at the Berlin Sportpalast he declared: ‘Mr Churchill is demonstrating to us ... his innovation: the nightly air raid ... And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities. We will put these night-time pirates out of business, God help us!’ With regard to the invasion, Hitler told his audience that, in Britain, ‘They enquire: “Well, why isn’t he coming?” Calm yourselves,’ Hitler proclaimed theatrically. ‘He is coming!’[1]
Still harbouring the mistaken belief that Fighter Command was on its last legs, Luftwaffe commanders, Kesselring especially, wanted to bring the remaining rag-tag elements of Dowding’s force to the field of battle to deliver the decisive blow. What better place than London? Not only did the city on the Thames house a fifth of the nation’s citizenry, but its great port was the hub of a transport network with spokes reaching out to the furthermost points of the island. The economic, cultural and political heart of the British Empire would be easy to find and hard to miss for Luftwaffe crews. It was reasoned that massed bomber raids would force Fighter Command to defend the capital, and there meet their demise.
Göring concurred, but had his own reasons for the assault: a wounded ego. He had always promised that Berlin would never suffer the indignity of enemy bombs, but in the wake of RAF raids, his stock with Hitler and the German people had fallen to a dangerously low point. Moreover, despite Hitler’s public proclamation that an invasion was on the cards, whispers could be heard at the highest level that his enthusiasm for the venture was waning. Göring felt success over London would restore his tarnished prestige and perhaps still bring Churchill to the negotiating table.
Expecting the hammer to fall on the sector stations, the squadrons were unable to intercept the bombers until late in their run on the city and well after many had dropped their payloads. The vanguard pilots were gobsmacked by the Leviathan bearing down on London. ‘I nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit,’ the leader of 605 Squadron exclaimed, ‘Staffel after Staffel as far as the eye could see ... I have never seen so many aircraft in the air at one time. It was awe-inspiring.’[2] In the face of impossible odds a mere handful of squadrons ploughed into the tsunami of enemy machines.
Two of the first squadrons on the scene were 501 and 504, flying out of Middle Wallop and Hendon respectively. Gibson was leading 501 when it encountered over 100 Me 109s. The screen was almost impossible to penetrate, although the unit was able to make a definite claim and the New Zealander was credited with damaging a fighter. A King’s College old boy, Kenneth Victor Wendel had only arrived in south-east England in early September when 504 Squadron was transferred in from Scotland. His baptism of fire was short and terminal. On patrol south of the Thames Estuary, he was part of the formation’s defensive rearguard, when six enemy aircraft dived out of the sun from above and behind. An Me 109 crippled his Hurricane and the machine fell from the sky in an uncontrollable dive, last seen by locals smashing into the ground near Graveney, Kent.[3]
Air-raid alarms were sounding in London, but the response was muted. The sky remained clear and warnings over the preceding weeks had been mirages. When the usual all-clear signal failed to materialise, Londoners looked to the heavens. ‘I had a view across to the east and I saw the planes...,’ wrote one young Londoner, ‘They were following the Thames like a little swarm of flies. They puffed up some anti-aircraft fire all around them and as I sat there watching, the planes got more and more numerous. The clouds of smoke began to rise from the East End. Then the clouds gradually became one huge cloud.’[4] Bombs from the first wave fell mercilessly on the warehouses, terraced housing and the all-important target, the docks of the East End.
It was not until about 5.00p.m. that Fighter Command realised that London was the day’s objective. The resulting aerial battle was on a titanic scale. One thousand enemy machines were engaged piecemeal by up to twenty-three squadrons. A grand but frightening spectacle was playing itself out above the upturned heads of Londoners. New Zealander John Morrison, himself an airman, was on leave in London during the attacks of September and was awestruck by the unfolding events:
The blue arena was a canvas stamped with the military lines of bombers in formation, but cross-hatched with the white cotton contrails of single-engine fighters peppering the sky with cannon and machine-gun fire. The black oily smudge of machines belching their last breath slashed across the summer vista, punctuated with the white anti-aircraft fire and the odd gently descending silk parachute. The odds against the fighters were formidable.
The commander of 43 Squadron dispatched two sections to attack the bombers while his own Yellow Section confronted the German fighters, in effect three Hurricanes against hundreds of single and twin-engine Messerschmitts. The results were predictable. The squadron leader was killed and the Anzac Dick Reynell was hit.[6] The South Australian Flight Lieutenant was one of Fighter Command’s most accomplished airmen, entering the RAF in 1931 and then taking up a position as a test pilot with Hawker Aircraft Ltd in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland he pleaded to re-enter the RAF but was considered too valuable to let go. Only in the August manpower crisis were test pilots rushed in to shore up the shrinking numbers of airmen and he was shipped out to 43 Squadron. But his considerable talents were not enough in the face of impossible odds. An Me 109 immobilised his Hurricane, forcing Reynell to bale out. The parachute failed to open and he plummeted to his death.
Wellington-born Charles Bush hunted with the 242 ‘Canadian’ Squadron, led by Douglas Bader. The fiery Bader had brought the unit back from despair after massive losses in France in May. When Leigh-Mallory received the call for support he once again attempted to assemble a Big Wing, which of course included Bader’s 242, over Duxford, in order to hit the enemy with a powerful punch. As before, the idea proved more difficult to accomplish than hoped and the interception of incoming bombers failed, but at 20,000 feet elements of the Big Wing did manage to attack a formation of eighty-odd aircraft over the Thames. ‘On sighting enemy aircraft, I did a quarter attack on the rear-most bomber of the formation,’ recorded Bush. This and a subsequent foray against the bomber were interrupted by Me 110 fire. In the dogfight he damaged both an He 111 and a twin-engine fighter. The former insurance company employee’s realistic tally was far removed from that of the rest of the force, which in total claimed an outrageously high eleven aircraft destroyed.[7]
On the ground, the Luftwaffe’s bombs found their target: the Woolwich Arsenal. Home to manufacturing plants producing munitions for the army and RAF, direct hits immediately created a conflagration of ground-shaking explosions, soon followed by incandescent flames and spiralling dirty black smoke. Göring’s next target was the London docks. The vital entry and exit point for the Empire’s commerce was carpeted with bombs. ‘We passed under Tower Bridge and soon were on the edge of an inferno,’ recalled a voluntary fireman on an Emergency Fireboat, ‘Everything was alight, tugs and barges were flaming and sinking into the water. All the timber of Surrey Commercial Docks was blazing furiously.’[8] The German machines laid waste to built-up working-class housing in the East End. A sixteen-year-old with the local Civil Defence confessed he was terrified, holding a fire hose ‘amid the burning buildings—I couldn’t touch the buttons on my tunic because they were so hot. My face blistered. I don’t think you ever get immune to it—the wreckage, the dead bodies. It was a kaleidoscope of hell.’[9]
Late in the afternoon, as the Luftwaffe departed, RAF pilots attempted to extract a measure of revenge. Leading 609’s Green Section, Curchin was unable to put a figure on the number of invaders he saw and simply wrote ‘very many’ in his after-action report later that day. The Australian managed to shoot down an Me 109 and damage a Do 17. Carbury was at the top of his game as he sighted ‘waves of bombers with fighter escort’ looming above his squadron. ‘The sections were ordered echelon star-board. I attacked [an] Me 109 which burst into flames.’[10] This was the first of two definite kills and one probable bomber before he was forced to land having depleted his entire reserve of ammunition, petrol and oxygen. At 6.35p.m., fellow Kiwi Keith Lawrence dispatched an Me 109, but not before seeing 234 Squadron suffer the loss of Pat Hughes. It was a hard day for the squadron as the new commanding officer was also killed in the fighting. Within hours the unit had lost two of its most valuable men and four days later was sent to St Eval, Cornwall, to recuperate and make good its losses.
The inferno on the ground acted as a bright and beckoning directional signal for further German aircraft. Luftwaffe bombers continued their runs on the city until dawn the following morning. In the eyes of an American reporter at the southern fringes of the capital, it was ‘the most appalling and depressing sight any of us had ever seen ... It almost made us physically ill to see the enormity of the flames that lit the entire western sky. The London we knew was burning.’[11] Compounding the difficulties on the streets was the release of code-word ‘Cromwell’. The massive raid on London, favourable tides and photo-reconnaissance evidence—revealing the assembly of invasion barges on the western shores of the Channel—seemed to suggest an invasion was imminent. Many took this to mean an invasion was in fact being launched, and church bells were rung and a handful of bridges prematurely blown up. In London, the ‘Cromwell’ order added confusion to Civil Defence efforts when road blocks in the city were hastily erected, hampering the movement of fire appliances and personnel. By the time the raids petered out, 436 Londoners had been killed and a further 1666 wounded. The following night a further 400 Londoners were killed and on 9 September more than 370 lost their lives.[12]
The night bombing of London would continue unabated for 76 consecutive nights and splutter on thereafter until May the following year. These nocturnal raids usually numbered between 100 and 200 bombers at a time and operated in conjunction with continuing daylight assaults. Although they were less accurate than their daytime counterparts, they were relatively trouble-free for the Luftwaffe bomber crews. Cloaked in darkness, enemy machines were almost impossible to locate. The use of airborne radar to direct twin-crewed fighters onto an enemy intruder was still in its infancy and most operations in September were a hit-and-miss affair. Night-fighter pilot Alan Gawith’s two-man machine was fitted with radar but, as he later recalled, ‘nobody knew how to use it’.[13] On average, thirty-one nightly sorties had been undertaken by Fighter Command over the fortnight leading up to the attack on London, for the beggarly total of three enemy aircraft claimed. Two of these were Anzac Michael Herrick’s victims.
At barely nineteen years of age, the Hastings-born New Zealander was one of the RAFs most skilled practitioners of night fighting. A 1939 cadetship to Cranwell, Lincolnshire, saw him awarded his flying badge early in 1940, and, as part of 25 Squadron, he was immediately involved in testing airborne radar onboard the unit’s Bristol Blenheims. The Blenheims were a light bomber converted to night fighting for Fighter Command. Given the rudimentary nature of the technology at the time and the relatively slow speed of the Blenheim, the fact that Herrick took out two enemy aircraft in a single sortie was all the more remarkable.
The 5 September operation had begun badly. Just after midnight the radio became inoperable, denying him the possibility of being guided into an intruder from the ground. In spite of the technical problems, he sighted a couple of enemy aircraft caught in searchlights. He destroyed a Heinkel in a five-second hail of machine-gun fire and moved on to the next target, a Dornier:
Nine days later he confirmed his status as one of the Battle of Britain’s best night pilots.
In the early hours of 14 September, Herrick was ordered to patrol a line north of London. An hour into the mission he was vectored onto an enemy aircraft at 15,000 feet. Illuminated high above him by searchlights, the German crew were unaware that they were in the sights of the slowly climbing Blenheim. ‘It took me about 20 minutes to climb up to it,’ stated the young Anzac, ‘I did a stern attack from slightly below and fired all my ammunition ... starting from about 200 yards and closing to 50.’ Now aware of Herrick’s presence, the panicked Heinkel crew opened their bombbay doors and jettisoned their bombs nearly on top of the Blenheim, and the rear gunner opened fire on the New Zealander and his crew, peppering the aircraft. Through his machine-gun-shattered windscreen Herrick watched the enemy aircraft plummet to earth and explode on impact. Back at base, he counted no fewer than thirty bullet holes in his machine.[15] But in spite of Herrick’s prodigious efforts, defensive night sorties were little more than an irritation to the night-time Luftwaffe missions that continued well after the Battle of Britain ended.
The element of surprise was certainly a factor in keeping German bomber losses to a moderate level during the attacks undertaken during daylight hours on 7 September. In all, the Germans lost forty-one machines, of which only fourteen were bombers.[16] Fighter Command was missing twenty-three aircraft with a total of thirteen casualties.
Overriding the casualty lists though was the new direction of the attack. Dowding and Park correctly assumed that the raid on the British capital was a sign of a decisive change in the German offensive, one which the commander of 11 Group was relieved to see. As he flew over London in his Hurricane the next day his mixed emotions were evident. ‘It was burning all down the river. It was a horrid sight,’ he recalled. ‘But I looked down and said, “Thank God for that,” because I realised that the methodical Germans had at last switched their attack from my vital aerodromes on to cities.’[17] Rather than bringing Dowding’s force to its knees, the bombing of London offered the breathing space the sector stations so desperately needed. It proved to be the turning point of the battle.
While the night-time raids proved costly, it was during daylight hours that the Luftwaffe most actively sought to bring Fighter Command to heel. Since the main aim of the aerial attack on Britain was the attainment of air superiority for an invasion, the Luftwaffe still had to crush Fighter Command, and this could only be attempted in the hours of daylight when its pilots and machines could be directly engaged. For the next seven days the raids continued unabated but without quite the ferocity of 7 September. The Luftwaffe fell into a two-day cycle of large attacks followed by a lighter day’s operations to recover and prepare for the next two days of vigorous action.
Over the next couple of days of fighting, two newly arrived New Zealanders were ushered from the skies over south-east England. Both James Humphreys and Greg Fleming were with 605 Squadron, now based at Croydon. The Greymouth-born Humphreys had seen action with the squadron over France in May, while Fleming, a Scottish child immigrant to New Zealand, joined the unit a month later. The squadron had arrived just in time for the Luftwaffe’s assaults on London. Their time on the battlefield was unfortunately short. Humphreys’ first close call came after midday at 10,000 feet over Kent. Fifty bombers were engaged until the Hurricanes were bounced by a number of Me 109s.[18] He managed to fight his way out of a tight situation but Fleming was not so fortunate, as he was shot down and had to bale out. The very next day, Humphreys also ‘hit the silk’ after a tangle with twenty bombers and fifty-odd fighters near Farnborough.
The enemy were in five layers extending above 20,000 feet, and 605 Squadron positioned itself to deliver a beam attack. When the German formation turned directly into them, it soon became a head-on assault. Defensive gunfire from the bombers hit one of his colleagues, and a horrified Humphreys watched the crippled Hurricane half-barrel roll into one of the bombers. In a four-second burst, the New Zealander silenced the machine-gun fire of a Heinkel leading the third echelon. As he broke away through the incoming formation he was hit by a Me 110, its cannon fire sending tremors through his aircraft as it tore away the left-hand side of the cockpit and destroyed the throttle control. Amidst the blinding smoke and acrid petrol fumes bathing the cockpit, Humphreys glided the terminally ill fighter down to 12,000 feet and baled out. At 3000 feet he pulled on the ripcord to find his left hand a mess of ‘blood, flesh, bone and glove all mixed together’.[19]
Although the Germans had failed to kill him, Allied ground forces attempted to rectify this. As the Anzac drifted close to a Canadian Army camp he was greeted by Lewis machine-gun fire, holing his canopy and severing a rigging line. A welt on his chest and a hole in a breast-pocket were testament to how close he came to being killed by ‘friendly’ forces. In hospital, Humphreys lost his little finger but the Canadians who had given him such a ‘warm’ welcome eased his loss somewhat by reuniting the New Zealander with his Hurricane’s escape panel, upon which he had painted a Maori tiki some weeks before. Humphreys had released the panel upon exiting his fighter and he was pleased to see its return as a souvenir of his adventures. Four weeks of convalescence was in order for the Kiwi and a return to combat operations would have to wait until 1942.
As grim as Humphreys’ brush with death and recovery in a Torquay hospital was, it was far removed from the nightmare that faced Fleming. The man from Wellington had been flying as the ‘tail-end Charlie’ for the formation on 8 September over Kent. The Me 109s which had failed to knock Humphreys out made sure of their attempt on Fleming. His Hurricane had been hit and a fire broke out beneath him, turning the footplate into a glowing cooking plate. Worse was yet to come when the gravity fuel tank behind his instrumentation panel was struck. This was the aircraft’s greatest weakness, as attested to by the number of Hurricane burns victims.[20] The burning liquid found its way onto his legs. ‘I could not open the hood,’ recalled Fleming. ‘I turned the aircraft upside down twice, but still could not move it, as well as the fact that I was still being fired on. I could hear the bullets and on turning my aircraft upside down for a third time, pushed off from the floor. I was thirteen stone ten and very fit so the hood came straight off the runners and I went out wearing it around my neck.’[21] During his delayed exit the twenty-five-year-old suffered sickening burns.
Fire was an even greater terror for pilots than the frigid waters of the Channel. Pilots were not fitted out with flame-retardant clothing; their only shield was RAF-issued uniforms. Even in the heat of the summer many pilots became accustomed to covering their entire bodies in an endeavour to create a modicum of protection.[22] Yet some airmen demurred, feeling that they were better off without gloves and, in some cases, even flying boots.
With regards to the face, the breathing mask was a potential hazard of the highest order should fire spread to the cockpit and find the oxygen-rich apparatus. Perhaps the greatest dilemma for pilots were their goggles which, on the one hand, could fog up, fatally obscuring an airmen’s sight, but on the other hand offered the best chance of saving a man’s eyes in a fire.[23] Only five days earlier another Anzac had discovered just how vital they could be.
Richard Hillary eschewed goggles. He was of the opinion that the claustrophobic lens gathered dust, which made it more difficult to locate the enemy at high altitudes, especially when fatigue added spots before one’s eyes and the windscreen of his Hurricane gathered specks of dirt. How under these conditions was he to sight distant enemy raiders? Hillary paid a high price for discarding his flying glasses, as well as for preferring to grasp the control column gloveless.
The Australian had just come off a big day of action on 2 September when he had destroyed two Me 109s and damaged two more. His luck ran out the following day. Over the sea east of Margate, East Kent, 603 Squadron was bounced by over 30 fighters.
Hillary picked up the narrative in his autobiography:
The pain he experienced from the summer sun striking his upturned face indicated he had serious facial burns. Thirty minutes in the water set his teeth to uncontrollable chattering. Within the hour he had lost his sight. ‘I was going to die,’ concluded Hillary, ‘I had no qualms about hastening my end and, reaching up, I managed to unscrew the valve of my Mae West.’ His suicide attempt was thwarted by the buoyancy of the parachute beneath him and an unco-operative spring-release latch. Over a three-hour period, lying on his back, the young Australian slipped in and out of consciousness. With almost all hope extinguished, hands hoisted him from the North Sea waters and a brandy flask was pushed between his swollen lips. His parachute descent had been reported immediately, but the rescue vessel had been misdirected, and was returning to base when the crew sighted the giant white jellyfish-like mass of Hillary’s parachute with him ensnared in its tendrils. On land, the numbing effects of the Channel’s chill waters receded and he was administered a pain-killing injection and transported to the Masonic Hospital, near Margate.
Fleming, after his own fiery escape, was mistaken for an enemy airman and shot at by local farm labourers. He landed near-naked, almost all his clothing consumed in the blast-furnace of the cockpit. The burns to his hands were so severe that those who found him attached tennis rackets to them by spreading apart and tying the fingers to the strings lest they fuse together. A nearby gate was fashioned into a stretcher and Fleming, in shock, was taken to a local cottage hospital housing twelve expectant mothers, before being ferried to RAF Hospital, Halton, Buckinghamshire. The prognosis was not good and the doctors recommended that both heavily burned legs be amputated at the hip. Fleming refused and, in his own words, was ‘left to rot’. Blindfolded with burned eyeballs, he was banished to a small room and administered morphine four-hourly.[26] The tenacious Kiwi might well have completely despaired had it not been for the arrival of a soon-to-be-famous plastic surgeon.
Archibald McIndoe was the head of the Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Sussex; he was also a New Zealander. Hailing from Dunedin and a graduate of the University of Otago, he had made his way to a Harley Street practice via the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, in the United States of America. By 1938 he was a plastic surgery consultant to the RAF. Hillary described his first meeting with the great surgeon in The Last Enemy:
At RAF Hospital, Halton, McIndoe initially considered Fleming too badly burned for plastic surgery but felt he would do well if he became one of his East Grinstead Hospital patients. Of the thirty-eight Battle of Britain men who came under the care of McIndoe, Fleming and Hillary were the only Anzacs. As such they would enter what would become known as the Guinea Pig Club, so named because of the innovative treatment, procedures and post-operative care they received.
The standard treatment for burns involved the employment of tannic acid, a substance applied in industry to the stiffening of animal hides. Orthodoxy held that the hard cement-like layer created by its application would protect the skin from the air and thereby hasten the healing of wounds below. Shortly after it had ‘set,’ the hard outer layer was chipped off by scalpel. The procedure had some merit in the case of burns limited to discrete areas, but was now being applied to burns hitherto not experienced, extensive third-degree burns. The results were disastrous when applied to large areas, such as an entire hand. In such cases, circulation was greatly reduced by the coating and infection and gangrene almost invariably followed. Moreover, the treatment deeply scarred the hand and twisted the fingers into a ghastly, immovable claw.[28] As Hillary noted soon after receiving the treatment, ‘My fingers were already contracting under the tannic [acid] and curling down into the palms.’ If applied to the face, it could render the patient blind.
Because the war in the air was producing serious burns victims on a scale not experienced before in warfare, McIndoe was better placed to observe the ill-effects of this than any other medical practitioner in Britain. In the first four months of 1940, there had been a reported eighty-nine cases of burns resulting from accidents and enemy action in the RAF, but the next four months produced 258 cases and, of these, three-quarters would die due to their severity.[29]
By early October 1940, while the New Zealander’s surgical counterpart for the Army had only admitted four serious burns patients, McIndoe had already seen dozens. Observing first-hand the numerous problems created by the most commonly applied treatment, McIndoe rejected the use of tannic acid, favouring the employment of a warm saline bath to foster wound health and general flexibility.[30] Within ten days of arriving on McIndoe’s Ward Three, Fleming was cheered to hear that microscopic skin growth was being detected, thanks to time spent lying in the saline bath.
The New Zealander was a skilled and fast-working surgeon. He was particularly adept at dealing with deep burns and the effects of facial disfigurement via the use of skin grafts and reconstruction. Hillary had lost his eyelids and in order to prevent the loss of his sight, McIndoe immediately set about reconstructing these from the soft skin on the inside of his left arm. He was incapacitated for five days, then his bandages were removed to reveal hideously large upper eyelids. When these had shrunk to a manageable size the lower lids were added.[31] Once this had been completed, Hillary was for the first time since his fiery trauma able to close his eyes to sleep. Previously, any night-time visitor looking in on the pilot would have been disconcerted to observe the upturned whites of Hillary’s eyes staring in ‘frozen horror’ at the ceiling as he slept.[32] Subsequent operations provided Hillary with a new upper lip and grafts to his forehead.
In addition to his considerable surgical skill, the Anzac surgeon applied his intellect to the psychological obstacles faced by his ‘guinea pigs’. His oft-stated aim was to ‘return every patient to a full and active life as a worthwhile member of the community’.[33] Not an easy task given the appearance of those in his care. Geoffrey Page, another famous patient, recalled seeing the Australian-born pilot just after he had received his eyelids:
To aid recovery and boost morale in the hospital, McIndoe turned the long low hut of Ward Three into his own fiefdom in which the ordinary rules of hospital life were either less stringently observed or completely flouted. Mixing commissioned and non-commissioned officers together, he broke down barriers between the patients. A radio was a constant companion during daylight hours to while away the time and drown out the cries of tormented patients. Whenever practical, men were encouraged to wear their uniforms rather than ‘hospital blues’ in order to maintain their air service identity. McIndoe selected his nurses carefully for their attractiveness as much as their levelheadedness. In this way he hoped to lift the spirits of the men and demonstrate that those of the fairer sex were in no way unwilling to socialise with them.
Nevertheless, acceptance in the confines of the medical system was one thing; going out into the greater world was another. Previously handsome and athletic men found the transition into society difficult in the extreme. The link between Ward Three and the greater outside world was the East Grinstead community. McIndoe and his staff persuaded locals to have patients in their homes and the village became so welcoming to the scarred and misshapen ‘guinea pigs’, it became known as the ‘town than never stared’. Eventually, Fleming, Hillary and other Battle of Britain pilots would, to varying degrees of success, find their places in the outside world thanks to the work of the Anzac surgeon and his staff. In the meantime, the battle over London reached its peak on 15 September, during which the Australians dominated the midday battles for the Anzacs, and the New Zealanders the afternoon struggle. Co-ordinating it all was Anzac Keith Park.
The Prime Minister and his wife were visiting Park at his Uxbridge Headquarters on what would become known as Battle of Britain Day:
The incoming Luftwaffe pilots had been told that Fighter Command was on its last legs, when in fact it was growing daily in readiness and strength. Although the German commanders thought switching to London would hasten the end of Fighter Command, Dowding and Park realised it offered the breather their pilots needed. In the six days leading up to 7 September they had flown a staggering 4667 sorties. In the six days that followed, this halved to 2159.[36] The London-centred defensive operations were intense, but were more concentrated and briefer than the preceding staggered assaults on the sector stations. Pilots now had more time to recoup and refresh before their next sortie. Airfields and the defensive infrastructure were all brought back up to full readiness. Squadrons were reinforced and it was possible to take new pilots out on a couple of training flights, rather than hastily inserting them straight into battle. Morale among the RAF airmen had noticeably lifted.
In marked contrast, Luftwaffe pilots were becoming less confident of victory and increasingly wearied by the incessant Fighter Command attacks. The oft-promised demise of Britain’s defensive bulwark seemed no closer than it had at the beginning of the battle, two months previously. Göring’s incessant claim that victory was just around the corner and that only one more final big push would carry the day was belied by the depressing appearance of Hurricanes and Spitfires in strength over London. While the first daylight assault on the capital had been spectacularly effective, in the days that followed Park more than ably marshalled his defences and prevented its repetition. Galland summed up the deteriorating situation and its causes: ‘Failure to achieve any notable success, constantly changing orders betraying a lack of purpose and obvious misjudgment of the situation by the Command ... had a most demoralising effect on ... [the] fighter pilots, who were already overtaxed by physical and mental strain.’[37]
Under the keen eyes of the Prime Minister, Park’s intention to meet the enemy as far eastward as possible was aided by a delay in the Luftwaffe massing its resources. With an extended warning time, the 11 Group commander was able to pair up squadrons to meet the incoming tide of enemy machines in force. Kesselring had sent over 100 Do 17s, escorted by some 200 fighters stacked in layers above. Churchill described the scene at Uxbridge:
A grave and frowning Churchill asked Park, ‘What other reserves have we got?’ To which the tall New Zealander calmly replied, ‘None.’ In his magisterial history of the Second World War, Churchill reflected on his thoughts at that moment as he saw first-hand the closeness of the battle: ‘The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.’
There were now over 200 fighters in the air and Park called on Leigh-Mallory’s 12 Group to reinforce the southern effort. The delay in the arrival of the enemy and the unprecedented speed in which Bader was able to get his forces arranged meant that a full wing of sixty aircraft was en route to London soon after. Fighter Command’s force was close in size to that of the intruders for the first time in the battle.
Scattered among the Hurricanes and Spitfires were four Anzacs. They and their colleagues were facing a massive layered cake of enemy machines rising up to between 15,000 and 26,000 feet and stretching to nearly two miles at its widest. By the time the first Anzac, Australian Charles McGaw of 73 Squadron, launched his assault, the German formation had already been buffeted by blows from other units for a full half hour. At 12.05p.m. McGaw latched on to an Me 109 straggler which, to his pleasant surprise, employed ‘no evasive tactics whatsoever’.[39] A long burst of his Hurricane machine-guns lit a fire forward of the cockpit and the enemy machine plunged downward, a dark streak across the sky. When the bombers were in sight of London, a full nine squadrons launched a simultaneous attack, many head-on.
Among these were two Australians, Curchin and Crossman. They were a contrast in experience. Having survived his initial baptism of fire, Curchin was now a seasoned old hand having destroyed three fighters and damaged a handful of bombers over July and early August. The Queenslander Crossman, however, had only flown older biplanes of Tiger Moth-vintage. By mid-July, and in the following weeks, he began his all-too-brief familiarisation with this mount, the Hurricane. He was a product of the ever-shrinking Fighter Command training regimes. In his favour, Crossman was fortunate to enter the battle at the very moment Fighter Command was gaining an ascendancy over the intruders.
Curchin’s 609 Squadron hit the formation only seconds before Crossman. The weight of numbers on the RAF’s side is clear from Curchin’s report on his engagement. No sooner had he attacked a Dornier than two Hurricanes horned in on the action. Ignoring the interlopers, he gave the bomber a ‘short burst of about three seconds from astern and then broke away and attacked it from quarter ahead, after this attack I noticed that both engines had stopped. The aircraft started to glide down. I followed it and two men baled out at about 3000 ft.’[40] Ignoring the Me 109s above, Crossman turned into the bombers, and black smoke pouring from the port engine indicated hits. Ammunition exhausted, he wisely dived away from the battle when fighters appeared.[41] Both Australians would once again engage in combat with less success two hours later. As the German formation lumbered on to its target, it was blindsided by Bader’s Duxford wing of two Spitfire and three Hurricane squadrons.
The staggering blow scattered a number of the bombers, making it impossible for the escorts to cover their charges effectively. Moreover, the Luftwaffe fighters were at their operational limit and were about to depart the scene in order to make safe landfall across the Channel. The ever-diminishing punch-drunk formation of bombers was forced to wheel over London, dropping their ill-directed payloads as they fled for home. Stragglers were soon picked up by Dowding’s keen-eyed pilots. Wilfrid Clouston was leading Blue Section of 19 Squadron’s Flight B when he spotted half-a-dozen Do 17s and ordered the attack. With one engine alight, his prey scuttled into cloud cover only to reappear with Clouston in hot pursuit. The Spitfire’s Brownings chewed off ten feet of the bomber’s port wing. One man managed to escape before the aircraft plummeted into a death roll, turning ‘over and over to port’.[42] By the end of the engagement the three Anzacs had taken out a fighter and a bomber. Additional successes included a probable and shares in another destroyed Dornier.
With that, Park’s controllers ordered squadrons down to enable armourers and ground crews to replenish the Spitfires and Hurricanes. Across southeast England, relieved and sweaty pilots gulped down mugs of hot milky tea and ate thick sandwiches in preparation for the next onslaught. It was not long in coming and by 1.30p.m. it was apparent that a large force was assembling near Calais. The armada was even larger than the midday effort, three formations totalling 550 machines. Ominously, four hundred of these were fighters. If the Luftwaffe hoped to catch the defenders still on the ground they were grossly disappointed. Within half an hour the New Zealand commander had sixteen squadrons on patrol and reinforcements on the way from 12 Group. The German waves crossed the English coastline at ten-minute intervals.
Among the pilots to strike first were the New Zealanders John Mackenzie and Lawrence in the vanguard of 41 and 603 Squadrons based at Hornchurch. Park wanted the front-runners to hit the Luftwaffe fighters in order to expose the bombers to the rapidly arriving reinforcements and both men were soon entangled in dogfights with the single-engine Messerschmitts. ‘I picked out a yellow-nosed Me 109,’ stated Mackenzie, and fired a ‘burst from starboard side and then from the port side.’ The grandson of one of New Zealand’s shortest-serving Prime Ministers—less than three months in 1912—Mackenzie immediately drew the unwanted attention of another Me 109 and he was unable to verify his kill. The affable Lawrence had been transferred to 603 after the death of Pat Hughes. The skilled airman opened fire at seventy-five yards, closing to within thirty. His target was a fighter: ‘it went up steeply and then fell away in a spin ... I used the remainder of my ammunition on two [further] Me 109s, which dived into clouds.’[43]
Scrambled to support Mackenzie’s unit was Biggin Hill’s 92 Squadron and Howard Perry Hill of Blenheim, New Zealand. A former 1st XV rugby player for Marlborough Boys’ College, the athletic twenty-year-old had made his first flight in a Spitfire in the middle of May 1940 and until now only had a claim in a shared kill. In spite of his relatively limited combat exposure, Hill struck the German onslaught with ferocity:
In the combat report prepared by the squadron’s Intelligence Officer, Hill finished the mission with six aircraft against his name. Most were shares with other pilots, but two of the bombers were his alone.[45]
Once again, Bader’s Duxford wing produced an unpleasant surprise, albeit mostly psychological, for the increasingly skittish German pilots when they turned for home. The harrying of the Hurricanes and Spitfires and the strong anti-aircraft fire—bolstered by the arrival of new defensive London-based guns—forced the bombers to unload their payloads ineffectually over a widely dispersed area. The massed fighters alarmed the Luftwaffe airmen. To one Dornier gunner the onslaught was as inexplicable as it was terrifying:
A former office clerk from Christchurch, New Zealand, Geoffrey Simpson latched on to a formation of thirty Heinkels south-east of London at 20,000 feet. Simpson supported a fellow 229 Squadron pilot in his attack on a rotund bomber, setting alight an engine. A second attack run by the fresh-faced twenty-one-year-old was hastily aborted when an enemy fighter made itself known.[47]
Over West Malling airfield, Kent, Flight Lieutenant Minden Blake deftly sidestepped a screen of Messerschmitts and ordered the squadron to attack a formation of nearly forty bombers. The New Zealander depressed the control column’s fire button 150 yards astern. The ‘winged’ bomber drifted wanly out of formation with a stopped engine. ‘I broke away and saw eighteen Do 17s flying north and turned to attack, but my windscreen was covered in black oil.’ Defensive fire had nicked a pipe, flicking black syrup over the engine cowling and canopy. He was going to have to make an emergency landing.
At twenty-seven, Blake was one of 238 Squadron’s senior pilots. The unit’s insignia, a three-headed hydra, was based on the mythical serpent-like beast of the ancient Greek world. Famous for is tenaciousness and ability to withstand the most severe of assaults, the hydra reflected Blake’s own hardiness as an airman. Born in Eketahuna, he combined a sharp intellect with considerable athletic talents. In 1934, he graduated with an MSc from Canterbury University College and a year later was appointed a lecturer in physics. For two years running he was the New Zealand Universities gymnastic champion and in 1936 won the national pole-vaulting title. When he twice narrowly missed obtaining a Rhodes Scholarship, he chanced his arm in a new direction and won entry into the RAF as a University Entrant.[48] There he found his home and rose steadily through the ranks.
His only blemish of note was a crash in mid-1938 when returning from a routine training mission over London. As he approached the airfield in the early evening the lights were momentarily extinguished, causing the New Zealander to overshoot the airfield. As he opened the throttle the engine died and he had little option but to glide his machine earthwards in the evening gloom. Unfortunately, he clipped the chimney of a nurses’ home at Croydon. The fighter flipped and planted itself in the middle of the newly prepared foundations of Purley Hospital. Blake escaped the affair with only sixteen stitches and a catalogue of bruises. The cause of the engine failure, hay in the air intake, was remedied by Rolls-Royce through a modification to the intake.[49]
On 15 September he once again demonstrated his ability to survive perilous returns to earth when his engine failed at 1000 feet and he made a forced landing at West Malling airfield. His only consolation was he was able to survey, at close hand, the damage he had inflicted on the German bomber which lay only feet away from his own machine. Two of the Luftwaffe airmen were badly burnt, but the pilot, who survived uninjured, was able to confirm Blake’s account of proceedings.[50] While Blake made his way back to his airfield by train that night, the respective air commanders mulled over the day’s events.
The results for the day had been impressive for the RAF, if not quite as impressive as originally thought. The confusing battlefield and shared attacks on single aircraft produced an impossibly high 183 enemy machines destroyed, which in the cold light of the post-Battle of Britain period was reduced to fifty-six aircraft. Nevertheless, Göring’s forces had been hard hit, and the actual tally was the highest loss of Luftwaffe machines on a single day. In contrast, Dowding was down only twenty-six aircraft and more importantly only thirteen Fighter Command pilots had been killed. For their part, the Anzacs claimed the destruction of six enemy machines without the loss of a single New Zealand or Australian life. As a sergeant in Blake’s squadron later enthused in a letter home: ‘What about the RAF yesterday? My gosh, for every bomb dropped upon the King and Queen old 238 gave them hell ... We went in as one man and held our fire until very close range and then blew them right out of their cockpits.’[51] For the first time RAF fighters had the numbers on their German counterparts and had pushed this home to devastating effect. Soon thereafter Churchill addressed Parliament: ‘Sunday’s action was the most brilliant and fruitful of any fought up to that date by the fighters of the Royal Air Force ... We may await the decision of this long air battle with sober but increasing confidence.’[52]