We arrived at Biggin Hill at the end of August 1940 to find the skies over south-east England becoming busier all the time, as they had been ever since Dunkirk, except for a brief lull after the evacuation of the BEF. This had no doubt been to allow the Luftwaffe a short breathing-space in which to regroup and prepare for their next phase of cutting through Europe with contemptuous ease. If there was one thing Hitler had learned, it was that command of the skies was essential to gain command on the ground. He now charged the Luftwaffe with the destruction of the RAF as a preliminary to landing an invasion fleet. Few in the world thought this would take him long; only the British were unprepared to concede the point.
I am sorry to say that the RAF was still in a time warp in which the COs of front-line squadrons were selected on a basis of age and length of service rather than operational experience and ability. It was another policy for which we continued to pay the price until 1941, when sanity prevailed and it was changed. But, leaving that contention aside, our new CO, Squadron Leader ‘Judy’ Sanders, was an excellent pilot and the nicest of men. His stay with us was brief, however, and the incident that terminated it would have been hilarious if it had not cost him his job and put him in hospital for several days. One morning, not long after we arrived at Biggin Hill, we were scattered in and around the dispersal hut, killing time as we waited for the ‘scramble’. Along came Judy to have a chat and check the form. Just outside the hut someone had parked a petrol bowser, and Judy saw at once what a good opportunity it presented to clean some oil stains off the sleeve of his uniform. He found an old rag, soaked it in petrol from the bowser and rubbed the oil off his tunic. Then he decided to have the one cigarette he allowed himself a day… Whoosh! We put him out quickly, but not fast enough to preserve his uniform or save his arm from some painful though happily superficial burns.
In the wake of this misfortune, as senior flight commander I automatically became acting CO, pending Judy’s replacement. I continued as acting CO while we had a succession of three further senior squadron leaders posted to us. The first of them, Lister, came to grief early. He, too, was a first-class pilot, who even had a DFC – a rare mark and honour in those early days of the war. His distinction had been won, however, in India, on the North-west Frontier, where local circumstances bore no resemblance whatever to Kent under attack from a modern Luftwaffe. He was sensible enough to fly as my number two, to give him time to gain a little more experience. Unfortunately he was shot off my wing on our third time up. He was wounded only slightly and survived, but it was enough to put him out of the picture.
McLochlan, our next noviciate CO, came to us from Flying Training Command, where he had been a flying instructor for two or three years, clocking up an immense number of flying hours – probably many more than the rest of us put together. He was also uncannily accurate at darts. When we asked him how this came to be, he replied that all flying instructors were good at darts. The reason was that they kept dart boards in their flight offices and, whenever the weather was too bad for flying instruction – as happened not infrequently in those days of limited aids – would kill time by aiming away with darts at a board. I suspected he would have turned out to be an equally good shot with his guns had he ever had the chance to use them. He never did. Like Lister, he flew as my number two to gain experience, and like his predecessor, he was shot off my wing on the third trip. Fortunately, also like Lister, he was only lightly wounded and survived the war, but we never met again.
It took the third incipient CO, Jamie Rankin, to break the mould. He arrived from a secondment to the Fleet Air Arm, as it then was, where he had been posted to an aircraft carrier. There he had spent the past six months, hazarding life and limb by flying some of the strange aircraft the Fleet Air Arm seemed to consider normal, but surviving unscathed. Like my predecessors, he flew as my number two for the first few sorties, but unlike them he not only stayed in the air but went on to become one of the outstanding wing leaders of the war.
Not long after he joined us I was the one who was shot down and wounded. One day he came bouncing into my hospital ward, hardly able to contain his joy. Apparently 92 Squadron had enjoyed a particularly successful engagement and Jamie had shot down his first enemy fighter. ‘One-o-nines for breakfast! One-o nines for breakfast!’ he kept shouting as he capered around the ward, literally beside himself with happiness.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
When you are marginally older than God’s dog, as I seem to have been for a depressingly long time, life’s perspectives change. It is not something to lose any sleep over, but there is an undoubted heightening of curiosity about what may or may not lie around the corner. The odd thing is that however long or short a time it takes to tread the road between boyhood and creaking senility, I seem to have been alive forever. Perhaps it is the case that memory of the past fades into a hazy nothingness, with no clear-cut starting-point, while visions of the future drift into a misty hopeful blur. Life, robbed of both positive beginning and end, therefore takes on a sort of mini-eternity of its own, giving every age and stage a comforting illusion of immortality.
Eternity, understood as an infinity of time, is a difficult thing for finite minds to grasp. Maybe the normal intelligence takes such matters in its stride, but my tired brain, struggling within strictly limited parameters to grapple with the enormity of the concept, needs allegories to give it at least a vague perspective. One such allegory is the one that concerns a block of granite and a sparrow, the allegorical block being a mile high, a mile wide, and a mile deep. Even attempting to visualise this vast structure is no easy task, but now one must go on to imagine a little sparrow that once a year alights on it and sharpens its beak on a corner. After this indefatigable little bird has worn the entire block down to a heap of dust with its tiny beak, then one second of eternity will have passed.
Yet even if this allegorical vision does help a little to crisp up an understanding of eternal time, it also deepens the mystery of how such an emptiness might be satisfactorily filled. Reunion with pre and post-deceased family and friends will come high on the list of priorities, of course, but even after the most exhaustive exchange of news and gossip from both worlds, I fear the granite block would remain virtually unchanged. Funerals are not the jolliest of occasions, but there is one phrase in particular in the funeral service that is presumably intended to comfort, though it has always sent shivers down my spine. It is the one where the presiding priest implores the Lord to grant the departed ‘eternal rest’. Why, for heaven’s sake. Whoever wants eternal rest? The very idea of it seems profoundly depressing.
If death is oblivion – which is, after all, synonymous with eternal rest – then life itself is nothing more than a fragmentary flicker of light sandwiched between two endless oceans of drowning darkness; in other words it is meaningless, the funeral service an irrelevance. Surely the time has come for priests and prelates to get their act together. ‘Life everlasting’ and ‘eternal rest’ simply fail to match and mingle as concepts; they are mutually incompatible. Life is consciousness and memory, the very opposite of the blank moribundity of sleep. No one wants eternal nothingness. Surely what we long for is eternal action, satisfying, stimulating and fulfilling, with memory retained and ties of family and friends broken only temporarily; but still my finite mind stumbles over the ‘eternal’ element. No doubt the answer is there waiting to be revealed, and when it is we will fall over ourselves at its sheer simplicity. Meanwhile the shadow of the vast granite block and the ineffectiveness of the punctual little sparrow with its eternally pristine beak do little to clarify my understanding.
My thoughts were mercifully clear of any of these introspective wanderings when I was a young fighter pilot, sitting in my Spitfire cockpit at 20,000ft above the smiling countryside of Kent on a lovely morning in mid-October 1940. This was despite the fact that old man death was constantly sitting on my shoulder, scythe at the ready. Once or twice I had caught him looking at me speculatively as he honed the wicked blade, but familiarity, while it certainly did not breed contempt, fostered an easy-going, relaxed relationship. Early forebodings, based largely on what had happened during the First World War, were gradually fading.
When history, taking up the words of Winston Churchill, retrospectively dubbed this stage of the air war the ‘Battle of Britain’, it was given a significance of which none of us who were involved were aware at the time. Churchill, of course, had coined the phrase in one of his magically appropriate speeches, this one made after the fall of France – ‘The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ At the time he was speaking in general terms to the nation as whole. When he came to utter those famous words that encapsulated all the glamour and mystique of the aerial battle (and no doubt aided the RAF’s recruiting drive).
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’, delivered in his strangely compelling voice with the emotions straining to break through the measured phrases – a tremor of anxiety ran through Fighter Command lest he was referring to our mess bills, payable by the tenth of each month and always a source of concern about how they would be met, considering the disproportionate scale of our socialising expenditure out of our salaries of fourteen shillings a day.
The so-called ‘Battle of Britain’ we regarded as part of a continuing routine, certainly not as an isolated historic event. Our current levels of activity were clearly linked to Germany’s invasion plans, but once those had failed (never an ‘if’ in our minds), other plans would doubtless follow. So far as we were concerned, the ‘Battle’ was merely part of the normal progress of the war, which we assumed would continue unabated until final victory. In 1940, autumn had been held at bay by an exceptional summer, though it was at last beginning to give way to a touch of winter as the Battle of Britain drew to a close.
The Germans were facing up to their failure to defeat our air force and achieve the air supremacy essential for invasion. ‘Operation Sea Lion’, their code name for a landing on the Kent beaches to spearhead a massive armoured assault intended to add Britain’s scalp to Hitler’s overloaded collection of trophies, was a dying if not a shattered dream. A story tells how Reichsmarschall Göring demanded to know from Adolf Galland how it was that the Luftwaffe with its Messerschmitts was failing to subdue the RAF in the air battle. What more did he need? ‘Herr Rejchsmarschall, a squadron of Spitfires,’ Galland famously replied, responding to the sarcasm. As he made clear later, he never felt any loss of loyalty to the Messerschmitt as an aircraft, but he did regard Göring’s tactical incompetence as a decisive factor in the denial of the palm of victory to his airmen.
There were still flurries of activity in the skies of southern Brit ain, and though the scale and frequency of enemy raids were noticeably diminishing, a few bomber formations with fighter escorts periodically continued to try to penetrate to London. When one such raid was attempted we were scrambled from Biggin Hill, with myself leading 92 Squadron. We successfully intercepted the raiders over Maidstone in mid-Kent, broke up their formation and turned them back after a fairly brisk encounter. It was a run-of-the-mill operation, and since it had used up all my ammunition I thought I would head for home. I looked around and found myself alone in the skies, apart from three Spitfires in the far distance. This was a not uncommon phenomenon for Second World War fighter pilots. One moment they were in a sky full of swooping aircraft, tracer bullets, smoke and flying debris, occasionally a parachute, more rarely a human body in free fall. The next moment the sky would be miraculously empty
It was around noon, and the October day, as I have said, was glorious. I could see Biggin Hill in the distance, and began to think of my uneaten breakfast. This I had missed as a result of the Germans’ sadistic sense of humour, which led them to time their raids to coincide with meals – especially tea, since they were clearly aware of the sanctity of this peculiarly English habit. I put my nose down to head straight for home and lunch, but then thought I might as well kill two birds with one brick and decided to throttle back and practice a ‘dead stick’ forced landing; that is to say, one with simulated engine failure.
It was breathtakingly stupid behaviour. It was so irresponsible that it would never even have occurred to me to warn new pilots against it. The skies of Kent were at all times a hostile environment, whatever the illusion of emptiness, yet here was I, as operationally experienced as anyone, casually putting at risk my aircraft and my life – a vital, valuable piece of equipment and a trained pilot, each disproportionately crucial, with supplies of both dwindling fast. I can only put the action down to an over-confidence fostered by constant exposure to the dawn-to-dusk rotation of ‘take off, climb, engage, land, refuel, rearm, take off, climb, engage…’ two, three or sometimes four times a day, familiarity reducing what had begun as exciting, adrenaline-pumping action to mere routine. In other words, I had grown blasé.
And here I was, a lamb for the slaughter, oblivious to danger, admiring the view, enjoying the sensation of speed as I pushed the nose down towards distant Biggin Hill, forgetting the fighter pilot’s golden rule to watch his tail however safe he thought he might be – always to watch his tail. I was sailing in a dream when my reveries were rudely shattered by an almighty thump to the back of the right leg. It came as a bit of shock to one who believed himself alone with 20,000 clear feet between himself and other human company. Worse was to follow: a rattling clatter as if some one were violently shaking a giant bucket full of pebbles close to my ear. Still it took me a further moment or two to realise that this sound was the jarring impact of bullets striking in and around my cockpit. Glancing down at my leg, I saw blood welling out of the top of my flying-boot, and knew that what had felt like a thump from a blunt instrument had also been a bullet. I felt no pain. With bullet wounds the pain comes later.
I jerked myself around, but could see no sign of anything except the three Spitfires I had noticed before. They drew along side, peered at me briefly, then peeled away. Whether they had mistaken me for a German, or whether they were white knights who had shot someone else off my tail, was something I was never to know. The point had been rendered academic. I was left with blood flowing out of the top of my flying-boot and my ailerons gone suddenly sluggish.
Here was just the sort of situation I had often mentally rehearsed, behaving with dignity, competence and calm, emulating those phlegmatic First World War movie heroes of The Dawn Patrol and Hell’s Angels, sitting imperturbably in smoke-filled cockpits, nonchalantly saluting their opponents as, engulfed in flames, they began a long spiral to a fiery death. I regret to say I failed dismally to match the image of the Errol Flynn prototype. I was panic-stricken, gripped in a blind, paralysing terror. This could not be happening to me. This only happened to the other chap! For what felt like a century, though it could only have been a few moments, I sat rigid and disbelieving, my stomach churning. Here was the real thing. This was what it felt like. All at once I had become the other chap for whom I had always felt sorry, though I had never lost any sleep about it.
The effect was devastating: one minute relaxed and carefree, in total control with nothing more dramatic in mind than a simulated forced landing and the day’s lunch menu; the next, inhabiting a doomed aircraft at 20,000ft, losing blood at a rate that suggested consciousness might slip away at any moment with death following within minutes. Death: so far I had managed to keep him discreetly imprisoned in the back of my mind, vague and ill-defined, a subject fit for black humour, not to be taken too seriously. Now he became a terrifying reality so close I could smell him. Or was this simply the smell of my own fear, unlocking feelings I thought I had defused and put safely aside?
Then, through no conscious effort, the wave of blind panic seemed to wash right over me and pass on. Sanity returned: I became curiously calm and rational, almost detached. Fear remained, but now it was of the right sort, urging survival, keeping the adrenaline flowing fast and giving speed and decisiveness to thought and movement. The upper brain took over from the emotions and began to assess my chances of living. I had two options. Either I could stay with the aircraft, accepting the risk of a last-minute parting of control cables when I was too low and too late to jump; or else I could cut the psychological umbilical cord that tied me to the cockpit (which suddenly seemed more of a home from home than ever) and step into space.
For the second option, the hope was that I would have time to open my parachute before passing out – and, having done that, would manage not to bleed to death on the way down. Running out of blood was a hazard common to both options, of course, so speed of descent became the ruling factor. The thought of launching myself into a hostile, freezing, airless void sent the butterflies in my stomach into paroxysms of fluttering, but there was no dodging the fact that by this point jumping offered the best odds, provided I delayed opening the chute until the last moment.
Did pilots receive any parachute training? It was a question I was often asked at the time. The answer was no, the official reason being that it was unnecessary. This may have been a hangover from the First World War, when parachutes were withheld from aircrew in case they bailed out at the first sign of the enemy. Only the unfortunate artillery spotters in their tethered balloons were allowed them. At least we were allowed parachutes in the Second World War, but my own instincts felt that the officials were right on the question of training. Fear is a great activator, and if your behind is on fire, then merely sitting on it will bring you nothing but blisters in awkward places. In my case the motivation was not so strong as this – quite the reverse. My Spitfire, far from being on fire, was still relatively stable and offered me a sense of security, however false. If it had not been for the obvious continuing loss of blood I do not think anything could have tempted me out of that cockpit.
There were various theories about the safest method of leaving a Spitfire in mid-flight, though the obvious way, over the side, was not highly recommended because of the risk of being blown back on to the tailplane and cut in half. It had happened. A better technique was said to be to roll on to your back, jettison the canopy, unfasten your straps and let gravity do the rest. Maybe this had worked for others; I doubted it would for me. I was travelling far too fast and my suspect ailerons made rolling a dubious exercise. I therefore decided to compromise, get rid of the canopy, undo the straps and give the stick an almighty shove forward. With luck I would then be catapulted out by centrifugal force. The trick might well have worked, but I never got as far as testing it. No sooner had I undone the straps than I was plucked violently out of the cockpit as if by a giant hand, hurled into a furious maelstrom of wind and storm and raging elements that whirled me head over heels, arms and legs windmilling uncontrollably, helpless as a rag doll in a clamouring hurricane.
The brutal blast of air assaulted me with all the sold physical force of a jackhammer, blacking my eyes and bruising my face with a ferocity of which I had never dreamed air to be capable. Fortunately the onslaught was short-lived. The terminal velocity of a human body in free fall averages about 119mph, slightly faster at altitude. Since the aircraft must have been doing between 350 and 400mph as I left it, this must have been my speed also as I first hit the air. But air resistance put on the brakes surprisingly quickly and slowed me down to a natural speed. The difference was profound, and as the gale abated, so did my mood. Replacing the howling chaos was a deep, dream-like lethargy that enveloped me. There was no sensation of falling, nor even of movement. Reality retreated and I found myself cocooned in a silent world, all tension departed, comfortable and relaxed, occupying the centre of the universe as sky and earth slowly revolved about me. A combined lack of oxygen and blood was insulating me from all fear and all emotion.
It so happened that on this particular morning my own parachute had been away on routine inspection. Before taking off I had therefore grabbed the nearest spare to hand. This one, too, I was warned, was overdue for a check-up, and I ought to find another, but I could not be bothered. I was not expecting to have to use the thing, after all, since I was invulnerable, wasn’t I? And now, as I revolved in space, cradled by my cushion of air and seemingly motionless – no rush of wind, no sense of falling – I dreamily imagined that I had left both chutes behind, that I was not wearing one at all. The thought left me totally unconcerned. It was a matter of complete indifference to me. Glancing down I saw that the suspect parachute was in fact in place, though the knowledge brought me no sense of relief. I would as casually have accepted its absence.
Time lost meaning and nature stood still until, as I dropped from the thin air of altitude into a denser atmosphere, reality gradually returned with an increased oxygen level and my brain resumed functioning. There was no way I could know how much blood I was losing, but I did know I needed to get down fast. The flight, on the way up; had climbed through a broken layer of cumulus cloud at around 4,000ft, so I knew I could safely free fall 15,000ft or so before I hit the clouds, and would then have time to open my parachute as I came out through the cloud base. It seemed I had spent a lifetime in the upper atmosphere, though it could only have been a few minutes before I finally entered the damp nothingness of the cloud bank and, seconds later, broke through into the sunlight and saw the glorious patchwork quilt of the Kent countryside spread out below me.
I reached for the ripcord and pulled. There was only a split second in which to wonder whether I had made a bad choice of parachute before, with a satisfying crack, it snapped open and braked my downward rush with a bone-bending jerk. My brain by this stage was functioning well enough for me to remember to pull the ripcord just the inch or two needed to release the canopy while leaving the cord lodged in its housing. It was rare for parachuting pilots to bring back their ripcords. A natural reaction while hurtling through space was to pull this life-saving device far harder than necessary, and most used ripcords were cast to the winds. There was a powerful incentive to keep hold of them, however. We were charged ten shillings if we lost them, and since this represented almost a day’s pay and a night out in London, or alternatively four evenings in the local pubs, I had always vowed I would hang on to mine if it came to the crunch.
With my oxygen level returning to normal, the euphoria evaporated and reality began to make a come-back. I dangled in the harness, swaying gently, studying the ground beneath me. What astonished me was not what I could see – I was used to that – but what I could hear: the sounds that rose up to me from the ground. I was accustomed to a noisy cockpit and earphones that cut out all other sound, but now, as I drifted down the last thousand feet or so, the silence was broken by car horns, by cattle lowing, even by human voices, which came up to me with startling clarity.
As I floated down over open farmland I could see below me a small group of agricultural workers armed with pitchforks and other businesslike farm implements heading across to the field towards which I was drifting. For the first time since parting company with my aircraft I began to feel a definite alarm. There had been stories of parachuting Allied airmen being beaten up and, on one occasion, even killed by incensed locals, working on the patriotic assumption that if they had been shot down then they must be the enemy. To complicate matters, I was wearing the German Mae West I had commandeered from the body of the crew member of the Ju 88. Apprehensively I gazed down at the group who gazed up at me, gripping the formidable tools of their trade.
The ground, from which a short time before I had seemed to be irrevocably separated, now rushed up to meet me. My wounded leg meant that I landed heavily, permanently damaging a disc in my back before sprawling over and over, the breath knocked out of me. As quickly as I could I sat up and pulled off the German life-jacket to reveal my British uniform. Nervously I surveyed the ring of faces surrounding me and saw with relief that they were smiling and friendly. Luckily my Spitfire had already crashed quite near by so my identity was never in doubt. Eyeing those pitch-forks I felt very relieved that there was no ambiguity. ‘We’d better get you to hospital before you bleed to death,’ said one of the beaming faces, peering at my blood-soaked trouser leg. ‘Where’d you like to go?’
I was stumped. How on earth should I know? My only other experience of hospitals had been some three years before, after my quite consequential accident in my Clyno car, when I turned it over three times and almost drowned ‘Puker’ Watson in the ditch.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
Slowly the misty clouds of anaesthesia faded and parted and I looked groggily about me. I was not impressed. It seemed I was in a barren, cheerless, ugly cell of a room. Dimly I recalled the cluster of friendly faces beside the array of pitchforks as I lay in a heap in a Kentish field. It was they who suggested sending me to the Royal Naval Hospital at Chatham, and although I at once had vague reservations, it seemed churlish to express them just then. My past experience of the skills of the current crop of service medics was still strong in my mind, but that had involved plastic surgery. This was only a simple bullet wound. Surely a naval hospital would be more likely to have knowledge of coping with bullet wounds than any civilian one. I was making a fallacious assumption.
Standing by the bed, hand on pulse as she studied my return to consciousness, was an anxious-eyed nursing sister. When she realised I was trying to focus on her, her face broke into a relieved smile. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t too sure we were going to see you again.’
Even in my doped-up state I sensed her obvious relief and was puzzled. ‘What are you talking about,’ I asked quaveringly.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this, but...’ – and promptly proceeded to.
Evidently the surgeon who got his hands on me had decided the best way of finding the bullet in my leg would be to probe along its track rather than rely on an X-ray. In the course of his exploration he cut through a blood vessel, whereupon the two ends sprang apart and he lost them. His solution to this dilemma was to slice his way down my leg in search of them, and when he failed to find them he stuffed the wound with dressing, enclosed the leg in plaster, crossed his fingers and made for the bar. As the sister told her sorry tale, memory slowly returned. I remembered how my misgivings had begun to flood back as the ambulance delivered me to that gaunt, forbidding building, and intensified when I was met by the duty surgeon, rheumy of eye and trembling of wrist. By that stage it had been too late to do anything. Not now. I was once again in a position to take action on my own behalf.
I sent word to the station adjutant at Biggin Hill, who mounted an instant rescue operation. Next morning I was transferred to Orpington Hospital, not far from Biggin Hill, where an alert young surgeon located the bullet by X-ray, just under the skin at the front of my leg between the two shin bones. He removed it through a tiny half-inch incision. Six weeks later I was back with the squadron, though still hobbling from the massive damage inflicted by the naval sawbones on the back of my leg.
Perhaps he would have found it easier to cope with a cannon-ball or cutlass wound. A modern high-velocity bullet had clearly been too much for him. He had managed to do far more damage to me than any German, but at least I had escaped with my life. I also felt I had gained fresh insight into how it was that Nelson finished up with only one eye and one arm.