After the declaration of war in September 1939, life for the fighter squadrons committed to the air defence of Britain wound slowly down from the initial period of intense anticipation into one long yawn. The ‘phoney war’, as this early period of inaction came to be known, lasted up to the summer of 1940 and the fall of France. Its chief characteristic was a feeling of unreality, and the event that summed up its phoniness for us was an inglorious mix of farce and tragedy dubbed ‘The Battle of Barking Creek’. This happened on the first or second Sunday of the war after all pilots had been moved out of the comfort of the mess and into tents pitched around the perimeter of the airfield, the idea being that this would make us less vulnerable to air attack.
Naturally we were on edge. We had been expecting to hear the drone of approaching bombers at any moment from the time when Chamberlain finished broadcasting his warning to the nation. Yet nothing had happened. A season of perfect weather, with blue unclouded skies and almost no wind, connived with the feeling of anticlimax. Meanwhile we itched to get airborne but no flying was allowed. A deep boredom set in, at which point a Hurricane squadron from a base in East Anglia asked for and was granted permission to air-test one of its aircraft. The aeroplane took off and was immediately plotted as a ‘bogey’ – jargon for an unidentified aircraft (‘bandit’ being the term for a confirmed enemy). Three aircraft were scrambled to investigate, and these in turn were plotted as bogies. More aircraft were sent to investigate, which led to more bogies and further investigations. Finally almost the whole of Fighter Command was airborne, flying in ever-decreasing circles as it investigated itself.
I was with my own squadron, cruising along the Thames at 5,000ft, when we were instructed to orbit while operations control got down to deciding what it should do next. There were various ack-ack batteries based on the isle of Sheppey, and each time we passed above them they opened up at us; they ceased firing as we circled away over the river then let fly again as we came back round over the guns. It would have made no operational difference to us if we had simply edged out of their range, but instead we continued blindly orbiting in and out of their line of fire. Orders were regarded as sacrosanct, never to be subjected to interpretation, and common sense was yet to prevail. The man on the ground was deemed to know better than the man in the air. Happily all of that was soon to change.
It was no thanks to the man on the ground that we all landed back at Hornchurch unscathed. At once our CO got on the phone and tracked down the battery commander at Sheppey, intending to let him have an earful. He was disarmed from the start. The battery commander said he was frightfully sorry, and he could see how upsetting it must have been, but he was sure we would understand his position. His chaps had all been on alert since hostilities were declared but with nothing to fire at they were getting rusty. Our appearance in the skies had presented a god-sent opportunity to get in some real target practice, which could only be for the good of the war effort in the long term. He was sure we would see the incident in that light. After all, the fact that they had hit nobody showed how important it was for them to have some target practice, didn’t it? Our CO was rendered speechless.
That was the farce for you. The tragic side came when a Spitfire squadron bounced a squadron of Hurricanes and briefly opened fire before it realised its error. Two of the Hurricanes were shot down and one of the pilots was killed, though the other pilot bailed out safely. The Spitfire section leader who fired the fatal burst was an old friend, Paddy Byrne, who had impressed himself on all at peacetime Hornchurch as an unforgettable, unbelievable, impetuous Irishman. Among Paddy’s many eccentricities was his incurable habit of being a jackdaw. He would fly off to another RAF base to have lunch with friends and return with an assortment of hats, greatcoats and gloves that he had somehow contrived to sneak out of his hosts’ mess and into his aircraft. He would get up to the same tricks in oar own mess at Hornchurch. ‘What’s wrong, me old cock?’ Paddy would ask you. ‘Lost something?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Can’t seem to find my gloves.’
‘Ah,’ Paddy would say. ‘I may be able to help. I think I’ve a spare pair about your size. Come along up to my room and take a look.’
Off you would trot to Paddy’s room, to find it fitted out like a haberdashers with rows of hats, gloves and coats neatly laid out and graded. There, among them, would be your pair of gloves, His Majesty’s issue, which Paddy, exuding innocence, would try to sell back to you.
‘Barking Creek’ was an episode that the authorities hoped would remain tucked under the carpet in decent obscurity. Meanwhile the only things to remind us of the fact that we were technically at war were all negative – blackout and shortages. The food shortages affected us little inside the mess, but in the world outside, in restaurants, hotels and pubs, it was a different story. The most a restaurant or pub was allowed to charge for a meal was five shillings (25p), plus a cover charge of one and sixpence (9p). Nevertheless it was always surprising how excellent a three-course meal could be supplied within these limits. One of the advantages for a junior officer on his meagre wage of fourteen shillings a day was that the catering regulations did away with price barriers and made regular haunts out of smart places which he could otherwise have afforded to patronise only rarely.
At this stage every fighter station kept at least one of its squadrons at permanent readiness, with the others on varying degrees of availability. This meant that we were, to begin with, permanently confined to camp. At the outset of war, and for the year or so afterwards, the business hours for fighter squadrons were extended round the clock, with the same squadrons operating night and day. This phase of things slowly came to an end as the new Radio Direction Finding system (RDF), began to live up to its huge potential. RDF was a British invention, the development of which was, true to form, slowed down by lack of funds until the Americans took it up enthusiastically and renamed it ‘radar’ (radio aid to direction and range). Soon it became apparent that radar could, among its many other qualities, ‘see’ far more efficiently at night than the naked human eye. It also enabled us to pick up approaching enemy aircraft before they crossed the coast, giving invaluable extra time to intercept. Before that we had relied on the ground wholly on the Observer Corps, an admirable band of amateurs equipped with binoculars and field telephones – a gallant but decidedly low-tech force.
As the development of radar progressed, so the limitations of single-seater fighters in a night-fighter role also became more and more obvious. As a result the single seater was gradually replaced by specialised night-fighter squadrons flying twin-engined aircraft with specially trained two-man crews – pilot and radar operator. The single-seater fighter meanwhile slowly reverted to a daylight only role, and the emergence of a specialised night-fighter role produced a new breed of pilots, among whom probably the best-known, and certainly one of the most successful, was the great John Cunningham, dubbed ‘Cat’s-eyes Carrots’ Cunningham by the press. The story put about was that his phenomenal success could be attributed to an addiction to carrots, which gave him exceptionally keen night vision. This likely tale was instigated, so he told me, by the Ministry of Food as part of its propaganda drive to encourage people to grow more of their own vegetables and make the country less reliant on imports. It was perfectly true that Johnny’s off-duty passion was gardening, but his success was the result not of overdosing on Vitamin A from home-grown carrots but of first-class teamwork between an inspired pilot and a brilliant radar operator.
Cunningham was one of the rare few who carved out an exceptionally distinguished career at the sharp end of aviation in both peace and war. Before the war he was one of de Havilland’s test pilots; during it he grew to be one of the greatest night-fighter pilots; and after it he returned to de Havilland to become their number one and a leading test pilot of the post-war era. Like all the great test pilots, he combined a cold courage with an extensive knowledge and an instinct for the air. There were no computer simulations to check design, detect and correct problems and minimise practical risks at the time when he was testing. His aircraft were tested, in the air, to their very limits, all the way to the point of break-up. The only method of discovering what those limits were was to fly the beast, and many a test pilot sacrificed his life on such hazardous, pioneering flights of discovery.
It was Johnny who, in the early post-war years, developed the Comet, the first commercial jet airliner, from drawing-board to maiden flight. This breakthrough for British industry took the international aviation world by storm, but regrettably the Comet came to a tragic end after two crashed mysteriously and killed all on board. For a while the cause of these disasters eluded detection, until a whole aircraft was put into a specially designed tank at Farnborough, which flexed the metal components ceaselessly round the clock until the main wing-spars developed metal fatigue and snapped. This was a weakness no amount of test flying could have revealed, and the discovery played a vital part in the development of high-speed, high-altitude military and commercial jet planes. It was a sad conclusion to the story of the Comet, but she represented a vision of an aircraft that had simply gone one step in front of the technology of her time.
Cunningham deserved a recognition he never received for his outstanding contribution to the aviation industry. The irony of our honours system is that it seldom recognises the Cunninghams of this world, whose daring and innovative efforts positively enhance the nation’s status – in the case of Cunningham at a constant risk to his own life. In the meantime it routinely rewards senior civil servants with knighthoods and other lofty honours purely for the negative achievement of hanging on within protocol and never rocking the boat. This, at any rate, is the conclusion to which my own observations have led me, though in 1940 my main concern was with the fact that there were people like Cunningham who were apparently daft enough to sacrifice their social lives on the altar of night flying.
No one could have been more delighted than I was when night operations were phased out for single-seaters. Of itself, night flying held a certain fascination, but as a modus vivendi the timing seemed thoroughly unfortunate, for what could be more vexing than to go on duty during the evening, just as the pubs are opening, and seeing the crews you are relieving drive away for a night’s jollification? The off-duty hours on the ground were for me almost as demanding and interesting as the operational ones in the air, and with the change to a day fighting role our hours of business became generally more civilised. The level of advantage to our social lives, however, hinged a good deal on the seasons, since our official duty began thirty minutes before dawn and lasted till thirty minutes after sunset. We therefore got the best of the bargain at midwinter. At midsummer, with double summer time in force, our day could begin at around 3.30 a.m. and not finish till after eleven at night.
Opportunities for social activity were limited at the best of times, and we felt a terrific pressure to live any we could grab to the full. The licensing laws were strictly enforced, which meant that every hostelry was shut after closing time. London’s night-clubs were always an after-hours option, but the travelling time to get to them left us little margin for drinking once we were there. As the phoney war dragged on, we slipped into a new routine and almost forgot there was a real war on as well. We grew blasé about the blackout and accustomed to the shortages. We took in our stride the stock response of shopkeepers to requests for some routine commodity which was suddenly unobtainable, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’; and the equally routine admonishment of traffic policemen hauling us up for speeding, ‘Must remember we’re not flying our Spitfire now, sir, mustn’t we,’ before benevolently waving us back on our way. (It was never ‘our Hurricane’, I noticed.)
Slowly we reverted almost to a peacetime routine. Time of year and hour of sunset permitting, we usually ended our day with a beer or so in the mess before setting out on a pub crawl, pooling our petrol coupons or occasionally filching the odd gallon of 100-octane aviation fuel from the bowsers at dispersal. On rare occasions, if sunset came early enough, we might take a train to London, start off our evening at Shepherd’s, where as like as not we would meet an old mate or two, then move on to a night-club. But if it was still early in the month, a trip to London might necessitate first calling in at the mess office to cash a cheque for ten bob or even a pound. It was a harmless and relaxing way of emptying our pockets, and why not? There was no tomorrow. So far as we could see we might well die of boredom waiting for action that never came.
The knotty problems of inaction and limits on our social life found no solution until the Battle of Britain, when the risk of airfields becoming prime targets for enemy bombers grew very real indeed with the Luftwaffe’s determination to flatten the RAF once and for all. We were not to know it at the time, but one of the reasons why Germany lost that battle in the air was its curious failure to follow up the few highly damaging attacks it made on our bases. It is clear that for a squadron to have all its pilots wiped out by a single high-explosive bomb as they slept unproductively in their mess would have been the opposite of cost-effectiveness in today’s jargon. To lessen the chances of such a disaster air crew were quickly dispersed and billeted in houses several miles from the airfield – usually empty ones the owners had vacated for the duration. With no one else to annoy, we were soon improvising our own in-house night-clubs and the quality of off-duty life improved dramatically as a direct result of the Nazi war machine having finally awoken, yawned, growled and rolled into action.
In Europe one of the main linchpins of the French defensive system was the Maginot Line, a massively armed and armoured string of fortifications linked by rail through an underground net work of tunnels. The line ran north and south along the Franco German border and was said to be impregnable to frontal assault. As the pride of the French High Command and the keystone of France’s defensive system, it may have been impregnable to direct attack, but it had one fatal flaw: it was not endless. On its northern flank it stopped short of the border between Luxembourg and Belgium, in the spectacularly beautiful Ardennes countryside, where, it was thought, the rugged hills and dense forests would be sufficient to deter any advancing army. They were not, and neither were the neutral borders of Holland and Belgium. To the anguished disbelief and dismay of the French military leaders, the highly mobile Panzer (tank) divisions crossed the Ardennes on the northern flank of the Maginot Line and swept through Holland and Belgium, driving a forty-mile wedge between France’s two main armies in the north and south. Their mobility and speed confounded the Allies. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the north, along with a corps of the French First Army, found itself trapped between the English Channel and a tidal wave of German steel.
In retrospect, the Maginot Line was always doomed to be an expensive fiasco. The concept behind it had long since ceased to be valid. As the French should have realised, the theoretical rules of war drawn up by victorious nations in times of peace are likely to be flouted when war becomes a fact, especially any that are based on ‘schoolboy’ honour, such as the inviolability of neutral borders. More importantly, they should have realised that the tactics and strategies of war are dependent on the weaponry available and need to be constantly updated. Up to the First World War it was the vulnerable cavalry units that provided armies with their mobility. These were gradually phased out in the face of heavy artillery and the early developments in war planes and tanks, leaving the armies with no option but to dig in and slug it out. A Maginot Line built at that time might well have had a decisive influence, but twenty years later the advances in aircraft, tanks, armoured vehicles and communications had revolutionised the conduct of war.
For their part the Germans had realised the significance of these changes and exploited them brilliantly with their blitzkrieg (‘lighting war’) technique, which used dive-bombers and airborne troops as the inheritors of the mantle of the old cavalry unity. These proceeded to harry the enemy from behind, cutting lines of communication and supply, immobilising airfields and clearing the way for the Panzer divisions, which were followed in turn by the infantry and administrative forces of occupation. Once they were on the move, the Germans became unstoppable both in the air and on the ground, and the Allies had no answer to give back to them.
In the air the RAF meanwhile began to pay the price of Whitehall’s peacetime obsession with defence budget cuts. It was the same price the fighting services have so often had to pay in the past, through being such obvious targets in any peacetime economy drives. It takes a war to reveal any dangerous weaknesses which may have been exposed, but the price of the pennies saved by ambitious civil service mandarins is always the blood of the men who trusted them. In the case of the RAF, the budget cuts of the 1920s and 1930s became manifest mainly in the form of second-rate equipment and a ragbag of machine types.
As the German advance got under way, a bomber squadron equipped with Fairey Battles was dispatched to destroy the bridge at Maastricht in an attempt to delay the enemy impetus through Holland. The Fairey Battle was arguably the most useless aircraft ever to achieve lift-off from the drawing-board. Not one of those battle planes returned. Every single one of them was blown out of the sky and every member of their aircrews was killed, something that none of those dead men would have been in the least surprised to know. Each must have realised as their squadron lumbered ponderously into the sky that any chance of returning from this mission was going to be remote in the extreme. It represented something more than a tragic, unnecessary sacrifice of young life. Members of aircrew who manned the front-line squadrons at the outset of the war were the most highly trained and experienced in the RAF. Nevertheless their lives were thrown away, bartered for a few knighthoods as a reward for saving money.
The Fairey Battle may have been an unmitigated disaster among aircraft, but it was not uniquely so. It was just one amid a medley of outdated sub-standard machines – Hampdens, Blenheims, Defiants, Swordfish and many others. With these a whole phalanx of doomed young men was expected to fight a war, and to go to their wasted if heroic deaths, victims of misplaced economy drives. If it had not been for the persuasiveness of Hawkers and Supermarine, who developed the Hurricane and Spitfire respectively, coupled with a campaign of exceptional pressure from worried RAF chiefs, then we would not even have had the few squadrons of modern fighters that we did possess in 1939. Even so, some of our front-line squadrons continued to fly and die in outmoded biplane fighters long after war was declared. Had the Germans moved a few months earlier than they did, then the overwhelming invasion of the British Isles by Germany would today be a long-ago fact of twentieth-century history.
The handful of fighter squadrons with the BEF in France in 1940 were at least equipped with Hurricanes, even if the planes they had were still the earliest marks. Unbelievably, some of them still had the fixed-pitch two-bladed airscrews of the prototypes. Heavily outclassed by the Messerschmitt 109s, they did their gallant best and took heavy casualties, and were soon brushed aside by the German war machine, which swept the Allies towards the English Channel in relentless retreat. Churchill had ached to send out our few squadrons of Spitfires from the slender home air defences, and he would have done so if Dowding’s warnings had not dissuaded him. They could never have provided more than short-term help; the problem was too fundamental. The BEF and the French were outnumbered, out-trained, out-equipped and outclassed, and the conclusion was inevitable.
At Hornchurch the taste of war at last began to tingle our palates as we anxiously followed the desperate retreat of the Allied troops as they were slowly driven into a coastal trap around Dunkirk. Soon the Channel would block their escape route and some form of rescue operation would have to be mounted. To the surprise of many, it emerged that plans for just such an operation were already prepared. The sheer speed of the Allied retreat had caught everyone on the wrong foot, but contingencies had in-deed been set in train by Admiral Ramsay, the far-sighted Flag Officer Dover. Since 20 May, with the writing clearly on the wall, he and Captain Tennant, the Senior Officer Ashore, had begun to gather together a motley fleet of ferries, coasters, barges and Dutch lighters. The original plan was to rescue the men from the town and harbour of Dunkirk itself; the third largest port of France, but heavy bombing and shelling had reduced its installations and loading quays to a shambles. By Tennant’s calculation, limited use could still be made of no more than the harbour’s east mole, and evacuation from the beaches, previously dismissed out of hand as entirely impracticable, became a serious option.
Less than a week earlier, on 14 May, the Admiralty had sent out an edict requiring all private owners of self-propelled pleasure craft of between 30 and 100ft (10 and 33 metres) to register them. They were to be placed at the disposal of the Admiralty, but would be skippered by Royal Navy personnel as an emergency back-up to the main evacuation plan, which was given the code name ‘Dynamo’ and put into operation on 26 May. With the veil of secrecy lifted, the navy relaxed its rule about skippering, and in the end many private owners got to skipper their own boats. As the news of ‘Operation Dynamo’ became public knowledge, it had an instant snowballing effect on other boat owners. Everyone wanted to take part, and the battle of the small ships was on.
My vantage point for the unfolding epic was in the air above the beaches, where I found the activity less exacting than I had expected. As I sat in the relative safety of my Spitfire cockpit, it was the clouds that were my main problem. Our orders had sent us in at 30,000ft, too high for the best of the action, whereas the Hurricanes were patrolling at 15,000ft. Needless to say we cheated and kept slipping down to see what was happening. Even then, though we ran into a few Germans, there did not seem to be the masses I had anticipated. If the Hurricanes had been deployed at 5,000ft, and the Spitfires at 10,000, then between us we could perhaps have been rather more effective.
Fortunately for the small boats there was not a breath of air and the sea remained flat calm. But the task of providing air cover was hampered not only by the extent of the cloud cover but also by its nature. It stood in patchy layers from about 1,000ft upwards – ideal for marauding bombers but not for our purposes. The German aircraft could pop out of a cloud, carry out a quick bombing or strafing run and slip back into the cloud cover, allowing little time for interception. Nevertheless I managed to fire my guns in anger for the first time, and had the basic fact brought home which I had tried to forget: namely, that while the aircraft in your sites was an inanimate object, the human beings it contained were frail flesh and blood. In those early days the German bombers carried little or no armour, and one of the first indications that you were registering hits (especially on the Heinkel 111) came with the spectacle of the guns arching suddenly upwards as the unfortunate gunners died and slumped forward on to their weapons.
I have already included the Defiant in my list of dud operational aircraft, and at Dunkirk it moved rapidly in and out of the spotlight of fame and notoriety. It was a single-engined aircraft, similar to the Hurricane in general conformation, but carrying a crew of two: pilot and gunner. It had no forward-firing guns, its claim to fame being a rear gun turret sporting four hydraulically operated synchronised machine guns, unusual for the time and otherwise unknown in a single-engined fighter. A squadron of Defiants sent out on patrol was bounced by a squadron of Me 109s, which mistook them for a squadron of Hurricanes and, as a result, attacked from above and behind. This would have been a correct tactic if they truly had been Hurricanes, but the 109s had to go through a learning curve the hard way to discover they were not. Instead it was they who presented the perfect target and the Defiants’ rear gunners shot them out of the sky.
In the first flush of euphoria at this success, the Defiants were rearmed, refuelled and sent back into the fray. But inevitably their moment of glory was transitory. This time the 109s were waiting for them, the recent lesson thoroughly absorbed. They attacked from below and behind where the Defiant was defenceless; the score was evened, the squadron virtually wiped out. Thankfully this was the last appearance in hostile skies in daylight for that abortion of an aircraft. Briefly it reverted to a night role before being consigned to the scrap heap which should have been its original destination.
The CO of the Defiant squadron had been my flying instructor at Cranwell. He was a gifted and sympathetic instructor, but after I heard he was dead the thing that stood out most clearly in my memory of him was his passion for rhododendrons. Whenever we had to find our way along some practice cross-country route, he would ensure that it took us over the area of scrub and conifer country to the south and west of Camberley where rhododendrons thrive. As we leisurely circled the area, he would practically fall out of his cockpit as he exclaimed at the flowering shrubs, which, viewed from above at the right time of year, transformed that rather dreary stretch of countryside into a vast sea of colour.
On the face of it, history should have remembered Dunkirk as nothing more than a tragic memorial to the obliteration of an army. But most packs of cards have their jokers, and the one in this particular pack was the curious genius for improvisation of the British, their sort of ‘backs-to-the-wall’ rubber-ball ability to bounce back in the face of disaster – even, in a way, to revel in it. Within hours of the realisation that nothing but a magic wand could save our troops, the magic wand had appeared in the shape of ‘Operation Dynamo’. Out of nowhere came history’s most improbable armada: a unique collection of boats of every size, shape and degree of seaworthiness; yachts, pleasure boats, fishing smacks, sailing barges, motor cruisers, dinghies – some beautiful, some tottering on their last sea legs, some owned by professionals many by amateurs. Everybody with a craft which floated and was within reasonable range of Dunkirk was determined to be in on the act, like Henry V’s soldiers on Crispin’s Day.
Many of the vessels in this extraordinary flotilla would no doubt have reduced a safety inspector to tears, but they set course for Dunkirk and, under the noses of the German military machine and the Luftwaffe, working against odds no bookmaker would have contemplated, set about plucking the members of the BEF from the surf and sands. Thus they helped transform a shattering defeat into one of the most gloriously successful if improbable military evacuations in history. Enjoying my grandstand view, I was staggered by the orderly, controlled way in which it all took place. The beaches were a shambles, littered with the smoking wreckage of engines and equipment, destroyed either by enemy fire or else by our own troops to stop them falling into German hands. The sands erupted into huge geysers from exploding bombs and shells, while a backdrop to the scene of carnage and destruction was provided by the pails of oily black smoke rising from the burning harbour and houses of Dunkirk and hanging high in the still air. And yet there the orderly lines of our troops stood, chaos and Armageddon at their backs, patiently waiting their turn to wade into the sea towards the boats, or holding their weapons above their heads as their turn finally came and they waded in up to their waists.
The glamour and bravado of the little boats has created a leg end that might lead some people to believe that the Royal Navy played only a small part in the operation. This would be very wrong. Undoubtedly the contribution of the small boats was astonishing, and the fillip it gave to the nation’s morale was incalculable, but without the navy the operation could never have begun. Without their continuous presence, organising, controlling, encouraging, shepherding and protecting, as well as picking up over two thirds of the survivors, the operation would have petered out in fiasco. ‘Operation Dynamo’ should be seen for what it was, an incomparable joint effort, with the navy acting magnificently in extremis, as it always does, backed by an ad hoc fleet of indomitable amateurs with an unflinching determination to achieve the impossible.
The figures give some idea of the scale of the achievement. At the planning stage, even before the destruction of Dunkirk harbour, it was estimated that the maximum number of men who could be evacuated was 45,000. In the event, more than 338,000 were picked up, nearly 99,000 of them from the beaches. More might have been saved, except that on the nights of 2 and 3 June, after the final remnants of the BEF were safely aboard, the boats for the first time returned half-empty. Those left behind, mostly French, were too exhausted and dispirited to move and refused to embark, preferring captivity to further war.
During the post-mortem after Dunkirk there was bitter criticism of the RAF’s role and speculation on whether it could have done more to protect the ground forces. In my view such speculation was misconceived. The persistent heavy cloud hid much of our activity from sight of the ground. Those on the receiving end of a bombing dive or strafing run are understandably most acutely aware of those aircraft that they do see – the ones which are dropping bombs or trying to shoot them up. They cannot be aware of activity that is going on out of sight, or of the many more enemy aircraft launched to attack them which were intercepted and destroyed or driven off. Fighter Command’s 11 Group, the sector responsible for the defence of London and south-east England, had twenty-one squadrons at the time, and most of these were little above half-strength.
I do not remember how many sorties we flew, but it certainly seemed as if we were spending more time in the air than on the ground. Between us we clocked up almost 5,000 operational flying hours, and with an average sortie time of round about an hour and a half, this suggests approximately 3,500 sorties: quite a few to cram into such a short campaign. According to official figures, the RAF lost eighty-seven of its own aircraft and destroyed 258 enemy planes, damaging a further 119. Most of us had our experience of personal losses. As my old friend and colleague, Hugh ‘Cocky’ Dundas, recorded in his book Flying Start, it was ‘bewildering and distressing’ for pilots to encounter the hostile question from survivors of the Dunkirk beaches, ‘Where the hell were you?’ ‘It is not surprising,’ wrote Cocky, ‘that we were ourselves inclined to bitterness when it was suggested that the RAF made no effort to support and protect the evacuation.’
It was unavoidable that our land forces caught on the open beaches should have suffered casualties. They presented as soft and vulnerable a target as might be imagined – a Stuka dive-bomber’s dream. This was a fact eagerly recognised by Hermann Göring. His Luftwaffe, he had boasted to the Führer, was poised to wipe out the French and British forces to the last man and would require no help from the Wehrmacht in obliterating the Dunkirk pocket. His assumption would have been right had the Luftwaffe remained unopposed in the air. It was not, and in this case it did not fulfil the Reichsmarschall’s over-confidence. From the jaws of what could well have become the graveyard of the trapped British and French troops, nearly 350,000 men were evacuated and lived to fight another day.
This statistic, I think, says everything – everything, that is, except for Churchill’s final comment, which characteristically put the overall picture into perspective. ‘We must be very careful,’ he intoned, ‘not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’
Maybe not, though I have never ceased to think that all the civilians who took part in that magnificent rescue operation could chalk up personal victories of their own.