The Dunkirk campaign left behind it a mixed aftertaste of triumph and disaster. Once again the waiting game began, but this time with a difference. The threat of invasion was at last out of the shadows and a subtle atmosphere of menace was all-pervasive.
The end of the Dunkirk campaign was also the end of my link with 65 Squadron. Early on in the action, Hornchurch had been sent reinforcements, as had most of the front-line fighter stations in southern England, and one of the squadrons joining us had been No.92. This was a unit originally formed during the First World War as a Canadian squadron, then disbanded and mothballed between the wars before finally being reconstituted as a British squadron during the first few months of the Second World War. It began its new manifestation at Croydon, then still in use as an RAF airfield, and was initially equipped with Blenheims, dubbed even in those early days as ‘flying coffins’. Mercifully it had re-equipped with Spitfires before being sent into any action, or before I was invited to join it after Dunkirk.
The commander of 92 Squadron during the Dunkirk operation was Roger Bushell, a barrister of distinction who came into the RAF by way of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, the part-time airman’s equivalent of the Territorial Army. He was shot down over the beaches and captured, later achieving fame as the mastermind for the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft 3, the German prisoner-of-war camp which housed the majority of captured RAF crew; a role for which the Germans sadly executed him. I hardly knew Roger Bushell myself, but those many former PoW aircrew who did invariably talked about the example he had set, the way he had raised morale, the inspiration he had given. His death was in direct contravention to the internationally accepted rules of the Geneva Convention relating to the treatment of PoWs. It was a brutal, vindictive reaction of a local German military authority, infuriated at being made a fool of by the escape operation planned and prepared right under its nose. To put the matter at its simplest, Roger Bushell was murdered, but Nazi Germany never lacked henchmen to perpetrate its worst crimes.
Bushell’s two flight commanders at 92 Squadron had been ‘the Paddys’, Byrne and Green. Either one of them would have been an outstanding personality in any gathering, though as physical types they were total opposites. Paddy Byrne, who precipitated the one fatality during the ‘Barking Creek’ fiasco, was short, dark and stocky, the archetypal version of an Irishman as the world pictures it, with lilting brogue and irrepressible humour. Paddy Green, by contrast, was a large fair-haired South African, a distinguished athlete and legendary high-living playboy. Occasionally, as the joke went, on one of his really good days he looked as if he had only been dead a fortnight. Yet behind that dissipated face, so lived in you felt it must be home not only to Paddy himself but also to most of his loose-living friends, there lurked a huge zest and appetite for life. It was predictable that women should be fascinated by his ravaged features and war-weary air, and he was never short of girlfriends.
Paddy Byrne was, like his chief, Roger Bushell, shot down over Dunkirk and packed off to a prisoner-of-war camp. Paddy Green, although he stopped a bullet with his thigh over Dunkirk, succeeded in getting safely back to base. The wound was enough to put him out of the picture for a while, though he was satisfactorily patched up and returned to operational flying in due course. Paddy Byrne was not destined to share Bushell’s fate at the hands of the Nazis, but instead used his native wit to work the trick of repatriation on the grounds of insanity, though that did not come about till 1944.
Meanwhile Bob Tuck from 65 Squadron, who was a flight commander by this time, had been further promoted to squadron leader to replace Bushell as CO of 92 Squadron. It was through his invitation that I now went to fill the gap in leading 92’s A Flight that had been left by Paddy Byrne. To my mind 92 Squadron always had the special ingredient which sets certain people or groups apart from the rest – a small, indefinable quality in the alchemy that gives an edge, a uniqueness. This quality can never be duplicated or planned for, but somehow it comes into being and is aptly called ‘spirit’. It always begins at the top, and 92’s exceptional spirit undoubtedly had its origins in the outstanding personalities of the original squadron and flight commanders. It then continued to flourish in the fertile soil of the rich mix of characters who made up this exceptional fighting unit: determined, committed young men, intent on squeezing the last drop of living from whatever life might be left to them at the same time as they refused to take themselves or their existences too seriously.
They came from all walks of life and every corner of the earth. There was, for instance, Johnny Bryson, a huge Canadian almost too big to fit into a Spitfire, who made a tempting target as he bulged out of his cockpit. Sadly he became a target all too soon and died quite early on. Then there were Neville Duke and ‘Wimpy’ Wade, both outstanding airmen who survived the war with distinguished and much-decorated careers and became household names as test pilots. There was also Allan Wright, an ex-Cranwell cadet, extremely bright and professorial even in those far-off days, but a determined and successful pilot, and then the youngest of all, Geoff Wellum, aged seventeen and known as ‘Boy’ because of his age. And there were Don Kingaby and ‘Titch’ Havercroft, two of the RAF’s most successful NCO pilots, both of whom finished up as wing commanders, Don having a unique distinction in earning a Distinguished Service Order (the DSO being a decoration reserved for officers on account of the leadership qualities it supposedly acknowledges) and three Distinguished Flying Medals (the DFM being a decoration reserved for NCOs and the equivalent of the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), which under the curious British honours system was the preserve of commissioned officers for performing precisely the same deeds).
Above all, there was Bob Tuck, extrovert and flamboyant, tall and very slim. His jet-black hair was oiled and brushed close to his head, and he had a pencil-slim moustache (contrary to King’s Regulations, needless to say). He also sported a scar down one cheek, though it was not a duelling scar, as he used to delight in conning strangers. It had been caused far more glamorously, to my mind, by a broken flying wire when he bailed out of a Gloster Gauntlet (the forerunner of the Gladiator) after an aerial collision when practising tied-together formation acrobatics.
Bob’s striking good looks and illicit Clark Gable moustache brought him a lot of good-natured ribbing, to which he responded happily with a nonchalant smile. He could afford to be nonchalant. In the air he was a total professional, and none was more highly respected. He was a superb pilot and a first-class shot, and most importantly he had the uncanny hunter’s instinct for arriving precisely where the enemy was; then, as lesser mortals turned for home believing the skies vacated, he would find a few stragglers still within firing distance.
In 92 Squadron we even had our archetypal playboy in the person of Tony Bartley. He came a close rival to Bob Tuck in cultivating languidness and nonchalance, and he was so good-looking it was almost in poor taste. He was also a brilliant, successful pilot who deserved more recognition than he received. Soon after the war he married the gorgeous and talented film actress Deborah Kerr, and went with her to Hollywood, where he stayed for several years. Eventually the marriage went the way of so many in tinsel-town, and he returned to England to marry another equally lovely lady and to remain ever after a close friend to me and my family.
In my recollections of those days a special niche is occupied by Bob Holland, our cherished squadron pianist, who could have come straight out of a Hoagy Carmichael film. He would often take over the piano stool from night-club pianists on our nights off, and sit there, a large drink standing by on the piano top, his eyes half-closed and screwed up against the smoke from the inevitable cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth, fingers flitting deftly over keys he hardly seemed to touch. He survived the war, but ironically was killed soon afterwards when instructing at the Fighter Leaders’ School, when a student misjudged and went into a collision course, killing them both. Music is a great nudger of memory. Whenever old tunes are revived, including 92’s favourite number, ‘In the Mood’, I am back to hearing them endlessly being teased out by Bob Holland’s magic fingers in every smoky night-club that we ever visited, including our own after we had set it up. The evocation never grows less and the appeal is there for ever.
There were so very many who passed through 92 Squadron while I was with it during its spectacularly successful early days of 1940–41. For each of those who survived and went onto greater things, there were many who did not. Some lasted weeks, some days, some no more than hours. Some passed through so briefly you hardly noticed them. They would be there one day, gone the next, names and faces forgotten. Generally speaking, the main hurdle for a pilot in combat was always the first two or three engagements. Anyone who survived these increased their long-term chances of survival as they picked up the tricks of the trade. Alter that they confronted an equally dangerous though more insidious problem: over-confidence.
Two important elements were still lacking when I first joined 92 Squadron, namely a motto and a crest. With the squadron having been formed in the heat of the First World War and mothballed soon afterwards, there had never been time for any one to give the matter much thought. It was a void in our identity that needed to be addressed, but it is never as easy as it sounds to pluck out of the blue an inspiring motto and a crest that tells a story. In fact the crest turned out not to be too difficult. Two things needed to be recognised: first, the unit’s Canadian origins, and secondly, a new factor that had just come into the reckoning. The cost of manufacturing each Spitfire was put at 5,000, and companies and organisations were encouraged to invest that sort of money by the prospect of having a squadron named after them. One which qualified for this was the East India Co., in recognition of which we were renamed 92 (East India) Squadron. Our solution for a pictorial representation of the two factors was therefore straightforward if not wildly original: a large maple leaf as a background to show the Canadian connection; a coiled cobra in the foreground to illustrate the East India Co. contribution to the war effort.
The motto was a more difficult nut to crack. We scratched our heads for several days without result, until I remembered a famous saying of my predecessor Paddy Byrne that was always a part of his briefing of a new pilot, invariably delivered in a rich rendering of an Irish brogue: ‘Now, m’boy,’ he would declaim, ‘you must foight or be killed or be ruined entoirely.’ I had my doubts about whether this exhortation ever did much to extend the operational life of any pilot briefed by Paddy, but it was a catchy phrase and there was general agreement that it could make something interesting and individual. Laboriously we got down to translating the proposed motto into Latin, but unfortunately, while the Royal College of Heralds accepted the crest without demur, the part of Paddy’s enjoinment that concerned being ‘ruined entoirely’ stuck in their gullet, even in the dog Latin devised by our homespun scholars. In the end, with a sigh, the college went along with the first half of the motto, and that is how it remains to this day: a coiled cobra in front of a maple leaf, set above the truncated motto Aut Pugna Aut Morere, ‘fight or be killed’.
As Dunkirk receded into history, my enjoyable and fruitful association with Hornchurch also came to an end when 92 Squadron was dispatched to Llanelli in South Wales, charged with the air defence of the industrial towns and harbours along the coastal strip that flanks the Bristol Channel. In that especially beautiful part of Wales our airfield lay alongside a great stretch of golden sand, out of bounds to civilians because of anti-invasion mines, and consequently utterly deserted. We were able to make good use of the mine-free parts of this facility in off-duty moments, while in the air activity was negligible. There was only one occasion when I made contact with the enemy.
Early one morning I was out on patrol leading a section of three of my aircraft from A Flight when we ran into a lone Junkers 88 on the approach to Cardiff, looking suspiciously as if it was on a photo-reconnaissance flight. It was a clear morning without cloud cover, and with three Spitfires coming in on its rear end, the unfortunate German aircraft never stood a chance. We watched the pilot as he took his plane down in its terminal dive southwards, pulling up just before he hit the water and scraping the top of the cliffs on the north Devon coast, not far from Minehead, before crashing on to the headland above. He finished up on a fairly level stretch of scrub and grass, so after we had returned to base, I climbed into a Magister, a light two-seater aircraft we used for communication, and re-crossed the Bristol Channel to land in the field next to the devastated hulk.
The Ju 88 crew were all dead, and the local fire brigade and ambulance team were at the scene, clearing up the carnage and wreckage. Very generously they offered me the victor’s spoils in the shape of an extremely superior and sophisticated Zeiss camera, complete with zoom lens and various appendages that were fairly out of the ordinary for the time, which had been found beside one of the bodies. There was a half-used film still in the camera, but when I had it developed later it turned out to contain nothing but shots of German military and SS parades.
One of the crew still lay where he had died, an enormous young man in his late teens or early twenties, both blond and beautiful. So much of a type did he seem that I thought at once he must have come straight off Dr Goebbels’s drawing-board, a designer-specified golden boy conditioned by the Hitler Youth movement and embodying the German dream of an all-conquering Aryan race. The recent action over Dunkirk had borne in on me uncomfortably the human side of aerial warfare that I preferred to forget, hypocrite that I was: the signs of German air gunners collapsing over their weapons as my bullets hit home. Here, on the north Devon coast, the lesson should have been rubbed in even more vividly, yet whereas over Dunkirk I had felt genuine remorse for lives I was taking and families I was bereaving, here I felt none.
We had by this stage seen many newsreels of such young men in action, and here was this perfectly formed young demigod, apparently personifying all we had gone to war to fight: the essence of the evil at the heart of the Nazi movement and its Fascist clones (as the modern term goes); the cult of the licensed bully and sadist who used their strength not to protect the weak and helpless but to terrorise and humiliate, to derive an ultimate pleasure in raping, tormenting and torturing the feeble and frightened, hunting in packs to give themselves the courage they would otherwise lack and feeding on the unreasoning lust of the lynch mob. They had the audacity to claim it was other racial and genetic groups who were degenerate, yet they themselves represented the most degenerate political aberration in modern history.
Faced with this corpse, perhaps I should have brought myself to feel more Christian, more tolerant, more compassionate. I could not manage any of these qualities. The furthest I could go in charity was to recall the proverbial claim of a well-known religious teaching order, ‘Give us the boy and we’ll give you the man,’ and think that it might be the teacher who was more to blame than the pupil. We already had our first-hand ugly evidence of the consequences of the Nazi creed from Dunkirk, when the remnants of four regiments of the BEF that had stayed behind to help cover the rear of the retreating Allies, finally surrendered under the protection of the white flag, one of the few symbols of the rules of war to be held sacrosanct. They were rounded up by the SS and nearly two hundred of them massacred before the intervention of a senior Wehrmacht officer prevented even more suffering the same fate. The Wehrmacht, the non-political regular army, was still relatively untainted by the Nazi ideology.
Gazing at the young man lying in front of me I could not accept that he had been some kind of non-political combatant. He seemed too close to the ideal Aryan mould cherished by Hitler to be a coincidence or accident, and any charitable or pitying thoughts I might normally have harboured simply remained frozen deep within me. I found myself looking at him with loathing and hoping that my bullets had not killed him instantly; that he had been fully conscious during the whole of that long, last dive, and that all the way down he had screamed out with the same terror his kind enjoyed provoking in others as he saw death and the north Devon coastline rush up to obliterate him. It was, if you like, a lesson in the way war corrupts the deepest feelings of all participants, which meant that my hatred, too, was an incidental product of Nazism and therefore another cause for resentment.
I was about to turn away when I noticed that the Mae West the German airman still wore appeared to have escaped damage. The German life-jacket was in many ways superior to our British issue, being, among other things, inflated by a small compressed-air bottle rather than by lung power. It was also less bulky and far more comfortable. It seemed unlikely that the late demigod would find much use for it in Valhalla, so I relieved him of it and wore it continually until I was posted abroad two years later.
On reflection, I was probably lucky never to have been shot down over water during that time. With no routine inspection of the air bottle or the airtight jacket – which, unlike ours, had no built-in buoyancy – I suspect the garment might well have gradually lost its effectiveness and dragged me bubbling to the bottom. I was untroubled by such thoughts as these as I was taken, complete with my spoils, to be fêted over a very good lunch by a group of generous Devonian dignitaries. A few months later, being more broke than usual, I sold the camera for £30, or nearly a month and a half’s pay. All in all, in the jargon of today’s accountancy-crazed world, it had been a highly cost-effective morning’s work.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
By this time it was around midsummer 1940, and while aerial activity was on the increase in south-east England, in South Wales the skies remained empty and there was little to do except enjoy the marvellous swimming and bask on the sands. With all due respect to the Welsh (being a quarter Welsh allows me some leeway to criticise, I feel), the pubs in the Llanelli area in 1940 were appalling: utterly basic spit and sawdust hostelries with, around the walls, lines of chairs occupied by local ancients who ached to burst into song and seized on the slightest pretext to do so.
Time therefore hung heavily and we seemed in danger of slipping back into the hazy unreality of the phoney war. The impasse was finally broken by orders from 10 Group, the division of Fighter Command responsible for the air defence of the South West. One of 92 Squadrons flights was to be dispatched to Bibury, a small viallage in the Cotswolds. From there it would operate a temporary airfield outside the village and take responsibility for the night defence of South Wales and the south-west of England. The only other flight would remain at Llanelli and be responsible for day defence only.
I drew the short straw and took off with A Flight for Bibury with mixed feelings. The village was not far from Burford and Witney, an area I knew quite well. At Witney there was an airfield owned by de Havilland, for whom my old friend Philip Gordon-Marshall now worked. It had been set up under government contract to repair crashed Spitfires and return them to service with the utmost urgency. Philip had been in charge of this operation from the beginning, and since he was the only qualified pilot in the outfit it fell to him not only to run the airfield but also to air-test the repaired aircraft. The satisfaction this job gave him compensated to some extent for his shattering disappointment at having been rejected by the RAF on medical grounds.
Philip had by this time been at Witney for several months, and I had flown over on several occasions, either to have lunch or to stay the night. While I always arrived in a Spitfire, Philip kept a few de Havilland Moths standing about, and somehow he cajoled the company into putting one of them at my permanent disposal. The aeroplane was a Puss Moth, tiny, but with an enclosed cabin seating three, and capable of landing on the proverbial sixpence. We used it for pub crawling. From the air we would spot what looked a likely pub with a field adjacent, make a few passes to move any sheep or cattle and clear a landing space, then set down as close to the pub as possible. Once on the ground, we would tether the Puss Moth to the handiest fence.
Almost invariably we would hardly have finished tying the knot before and air-raid warden or Home Guard member appeared from nowhere and offered to stand guard over our machine for us. Accepting these offers always made me feel faintly uneasy and embarrassed. It hardly seemed a correct use of His Majesty’s forces, even if they were from a volunteer sector. Had the plane been a Spitfire, and had I been on a mission to sink something more war-worthy than a few pints, the case would have been different. It seemed most unlikely that any self-respecting spy or fifth columnist was going to risk his neck hijacking a toy aeroplane that was already in widespread use throughout the Continent, including Germany. However, these impromptu guardians seemed to derive genuine satisfaction from the job and it would have seemed churlish to tell them not to worry. No doubt it relieved the boredom of staring at nothing but sheep.
Bibury itself was a small and charming village, noted for its excellent pub, the Swan. Nevertheless, A Flight tended to make Burford its unofficial headquarters, mainly because of my contacts there through Philip. In those days, long before motorways triggered the ‘Yuppie’ explosion of traffic and the age of wall-to-wall Range Rovers, the whole area was totally unspoiled. The road that skirted Burford from Witney was lazy and winding, and Burford still lurked down a small side-road, hidden from passing traffic by the crest of a hill. Two ancient pubs dominated the village, the Bull and the Lamb, each of them superb in its different way. The Bull was black-and-white timber framing, heavy with oak beams, sagging ceilings and bulging walls. The equally ancient Lamb was cast in a different mould: built in the classic Cotswold style from the lovely honey-coloured local stone, with deeply worn flag floors and mullioned windows. One other institution of note was a small but rather grand restaurant called the Bay Tree, almost next-door to the Lamb. I sampled it once or twice and found it outstanding, but food as such never came high on our list of priorities. Whatever precious spare time came our way we preferred to squander imbibing in pubs.
Our landing field in Bibury did little to inspire confidence. It was a small meadow commandeered from a local farmer, and it really did look like a pocket handkerchief as you made an approach from the air. There were three or four bell tents erected as a mess, sleeping quarters and pilots’ dispersal, where we hung about from dusk till dawn, dozing or reading while waiting to be scrambled. Our off-duty daylight hours were perfectly pleasant. As soon as we were released at dawn, we would snatch a few hours’ sleep before driving into Burford for a few drinks and a sandwich. Then we lazed away the afternoons, dozing by dispersal in deck chairs, reading again, or perhaps going to watch the brown trout from the bridge that crossed the stream which ran through Bibury, hypnotised by the fluid and elegant movements of the fish and their lazy but total control over their element.
Day flying was restricted to air-testing aircraft after repairs or servicing, but the field was so small it demanded intense concentration even when landing in daylight. After dark it became a nightmare, and the few weeks we spent there were among the most alarming I spent in all the war. Operating from that dreadful little postage stamp at least kept us on our toes. The Spitfire, as I commented earlier, was at its worst on the ground – unbalanced and unstable, the nose very long and the undercarriage narrow and set far back. A bit of clumsy braking or a slight unevenness of the ground could be enough to tip it on to its propeller, while the ‘nose-up’ position, the aircraft’s attitude when both taxiing and landing, made direct forward vision non-existent even in daylight. The pilot therefore had to cope with a restricted view of around forty-five degrees to either side of the line he wished to take.
Taxiing was not such a problem. You simply wove from side to side, and if in doubt stopped. Landing-was more complicated since it was inevitably done at speed and stopping was impossible. I adopted the tactic of coming in on a long gentle curve to gain an oblique view down the landing-strip until the last moment. Even when using this technique, from the instant you were holding off before touch-down you were committed, and if there was something in the way, you could only know about it as you hit it. Then, as you were rolling along the ground and rushing blindly forward, you braked as firmly as you dared and hoped you would slow and stop before running headlong into the boundary hedge, which remained invisible.
These daytime problems remained relatively routine, however, in comparison with the night-flying situation, when they were compounded by the flames from the two exhaust outlets, set one on either side of the engine cowling in direct line with the pilot’s already limited vision. The flames, invisible in daylight, became blinding glares in the dark. To combat their dazzle, detachable metal bolts were bolted on to the cowling at night. These were effective in shielding the pilot’s eyes from the glare, but they restricted his forward view even further.
On a normal airfield with normal lighting, we would all have taken such hazards in our stride. We were conditioned to flying Spitfires by night and accustomed to their little idiosyncrasies, but at this point 10 Group became particularly nervous about the prospect of night raids and obsessed with security. As a result, all airfield lighting was reduced to well below the already timorous levels that had been set at the beginning of war.
For night flying, airfield lighting consisted of a chance light – a mobile floodlight positioned at the downwind end of the landing run – and a row of glim lamps, or marker lights, placed at intervals along one edge of the strip. Unless there was enemy air activity in the vicinity, the chance light was normally switched on the moment a homing aircraft was heard approaching the air field, and switched off as soon as its landing run was finished. Because of 10 Group’s security anxiety, the chance light at Bibury could not be switched on until a pilot was virtually touching down, while the glim lights were halved in number and, I suspected, halved in strength. They were also hooded, so that they could only be seen obliquely from the air, and not at all from directly overhead. These regulations, in combination with the Spitfire’s known limitations at night and our tiny and dangerously unsuitable field, made every take-off and landing a hair-raising stunt in itself.
While we were still at Bibury the amount of enemy activity in the night skies over South Wales remained fairly sparse: mostly single bombers making spot attacks on ports and harbour installations. They kept us very busy, but in a way that left us feeling we were very busy risking lives and aircraft and wasting fuel with out the ghost of chance of ever making contact with the enemy. When it came to the bottom line, we lacked the equipment to operate effectively, and so did ground control. For the most part we were in a moonless period, with nights very dark and slightly hazy and no visible horizon. It was like flying in a barrel of Guinness. We were completely reliant on our instruments and could only blindly follow instructions from the ground.
The experience brought back to me the first time I had flown at night in a blackout, on an exercise flight before the war. I had taken off from Hornchurch in one of our newly acquired Spitfires and was at about 10,000ft over Southend-on-Sea on a beautiful starlit but moonless night. Before me lay London, its suburbs and satellites, spread out in a glittering display of lights – a lovely, comforting sight. Suddenly Southend vanished from beneath me, and one by one all the other huge areas of light disappeared in quick succession until I found myself alone in a lightless world. In reality, it was a fairly unremarkable effect, but it had a most curious impact. For several seconds I felt divorced from all living things, entirely isolated, trapped in a small black suffocating hole in the air without a hope of escape. The sensation lasted only a few moments, yet ever afterwards, whenever downcast and low in spirits, I found the same feeling returning and experienced the same sensation of entrapment in a black, all-enveloping void, which it took a positive effort to will away.
Hunting down enemy bombers in the dark over South Wales seemed a far distance and a lifetime away from peacetime Southend, but there were certain eerie qualities that somehow linked the experiences. We would be vectored by ground patrol towards their plot of a raider, and as we groped our way towards the enemy intruder in stifling blackness we began to pick up the voices of a bomber crew chattering away in German. The sounds would at first be so faint as to be almost inaudible, and then they slowly grew louder and louder until they reached crescendo and collision seemed inevitable. You strained your eyes and twisted your neck in frantic efforts to penetrate the horizonless dark, yet however hard you tried you never saw the enemy. And then, as you braced yourself for collision, the sweat emerging from every pore in your body, the voices started slowly to fade and the crisis passed you by. Feeling as limp as a wrung-out rag, you had no idea whether you ought to be relieved to be still alive or disappointed that you had not been able to see the enemy and shoot him to blazes.
Anyway, you had survived your hour or so on patrol. All you needed to do now was find the airfield again. Ground control could vector you to the area, but after that you were on your own since they could never give you an exact position. Somewhere below you was the airfield controller, unable to switch on the chance light until he was sure you were well into your final approach, and the four or six glim lamps, hooded to make them invisible from directly above. It constantly staggered me that we managed to avoid writing off most of A Flight during this period of operation. Several pilots did opt to land at better-lit airfields they had stumbled on by accident, and one pilot bailed out, having failed to find anywhere at all to land before his fuel ran out. That, amazingly, was the full catalogue of our mishaps.
From almost our first day at Bibury I had been on the telephone to 10 Group, attempting to convince them that what they were expecting us to do was dangerously counter-productive, that our chances of shooting down a German were virtually zero, that the risk to our pilots and aircraft was considerable. All to no avail. I continued to telephone those deaf ears, making the point that we had survived so far thanks to an extraordinary run of luck which could not possibly last for ever. At last I reached a point where I had finally persuaded them. Then the worst happened.
Allan Wright, out on patrol over Cardiff, was vectored on to a German bomber and went through the usual experience of hearing the crews’ natter grow louder and louder. But this time, as he searched desperately around for the source of the voices, he saw, not many feet in front and slightly above him, a pair of glowing exhausts. Two engines could only mean an enemy bomber. He pulled up his nose, opened fire at the black space between the exhausts, and sent what turned out to be a Heinkel 111 down in flames.
The consequence, of course, was that all my groundwork in trying to persuade 10 Group that their ideas were idiocy had gone down in flames as well, aborted by one impossibly lucky stroke. They would now smugly consider they had been right all along and that Kingcome was nothing more than a hysterical fool. Poor Allan returned expecting, if not a standing ovation, at least a pat on the back and a word of congratulation. Instead he found himself facing a blast of quite the opposite. How, we all demanded to know, could he have been such a twit, to do something so daft just as 10 Group was beginning to see reason? It was certain he had set our cause back indefinitely, and now here we were, stuck on this god-forsaken strip of rough field for ever. A thoroughly chastened Allan Wright crept off to bed, having in fact performed a first-class piece of airmanship that fully deserved a hero’s ovation. Reader, have no fear, we made it up to him later.
It turned out that we need not have worried. A day or two after this incident news came through that the squadron was being posted from Llanelli to Biggin Hill, not far south of London in the county of Kent. Life was on the up-swing, though Bob Tuck left us just before we were posted, to take command of a Hurricane squadron in East Anglia. He, too, came to Biggin Hill a year later, as Wing Commander Flying, and built himself a deservedly great name before he was shot down on a low-flying sortie over France. He wound up in Stalag 111, but escaped through the advancing Russians and made it safely back to England just before the armistice. His hunting instincts never deserted him. After the war he became friends with Germany’s most famous airman and senior commander, Adolf Galland. They met up frequently to go off on hunting expeditions, tracking everything from wild boar in the Black Forest to brown bears in Alaska.