It was the summer of 1942, by which time the tide of war, or certainly of the air war, was beginning to flow against the Germans. The crucial date of 7 December 1941 – the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – had ended the neutrality of the United States and brought her in on the Allied side. Daylight bombing raids on Britain became almost a thing of the past, except for opportunist sorties by one or two aircraft in bad weather. I had left 72 Squadron and Biggin Hill to take over as Wing Commander Flying at Kenley, a fighter station similar to Biggin Hill but a few miles to the west. The Kenley wing was built up from four Spitfire squadrons based at Kenley and Redhill, the first to arrive that August being No.402 Squadron (Canadian). Towards the end of September it was joined by its sister Canadian squadrons, Nos 401, 412 and 416. From then on we became known as the ‘Canadian Wing’. Our Station Commander was Group Captain Richard ‘Batchy’ Atcherley (later Air Marshal Sir Richard Atcherley). To my mind it was the perfect posting. I could not have asked for better squadrons or a better station commander.
The timing of the war had played cruel tricks on the careers of some of the generation of pre-war pilots. For the Cranwell adjutant it came too soon; this was unusual. For most it arrived too late. The 1930s produced a number of legendary pilots who would have excelled in the Second World War, but they were just that touch too old by the time it broke out. It must have been a bitter pill for them to swallow. Nevertheless they masked their disappointment and, with their warmth and advice, generously welcomed the new wave of young pilots who stepped forward to take their place in the air. The one who fell within this bracket whom I recall most clearly – and with deep affection – was the famous ‘Batchy’. He was probably the best known of the handful of larger-than-life pre-war pilots who had brought glamour and excitement to the emerging new world of flying.
Batchy had been a member of the 1929 Schneider RAF High Speed Flight, which won the airspeed record that year, repeating its original triumph of 1927 before going on to complete the hat-trick in 1931. With his equally daredevil identical twin, David, he had achieved legendary fame in aviation circles with a repertoire of crazy though highly skilled exploits. The brothers were illustrious for, among other things, their barnstorming activities at air displays in both Britain and the United States. One of Batchy’s party tricks was a variant on the old circus act, when a ‘drunk’ would stagger into the ring, leap on to one of the performing horses, and proceed to go though a series of amazing equestrian stunts. In Batchy’s case he disguised himself as a mad professor dressed in exaggerated civilian clothes, with flowing false beard and locks and pebble spectacles, before making a dash out from the control tower on to the host airfield with the guards in hot pursuit. Meanwhile an aircraft would be taxiing out for take-off, but in a trice Batchy would have hauled its frantically protesting pilot out of the cockpit, have leapt in, pushed the throttle wide and scrambled wildly into the air. Once aloft he would go through a set of the most hair-raising aerobatics, seeming to miss the ground and the gaping crowds by inches before performing an equally hair-raising landing, leaping from the cockpit and escaping into the distance.
It was said that when the twins were serving in the Middle East they were in the habit of signing their names in the desert sands with the wingtips of their aircraft. Whether there was any truth in this tale I cannot personally say, but it seemed entirely in keeping with their characters and skills. Both rose to high rank and the story of their unique careers was celebrated in a book by John Pudney called A Pride of Unicorns. David, alas, went missing in a Meteor a few years after the war. In 1952 he was on a tour of inspection in the Middle East and on a flight from Fa’id to Nicosia, when he stopped off to refuel at Cairo. He never reached Cyprus but disappeared somewhere over the eastern Mediterranean. No trace of his aircraft was ever found, despite an extensive search. I always felt that the main suspect was his carefree nature, in the light of which he may well have decided not to hang about to top up with oxygen at Cairo, reasoning it would hardly be necessary for the short final leg of his journey. If my theory is correct, then it is entirely possible that he passed out and plunged into the sea before he had time to radio a warning. It is the only hypothesis that seems to fit with his happy-go-lucky personality and the few known facts.
At Kenley I had two main tasks. The first was to lead my wing of four squadrons in fighter sweeps over France on sabre-rattling expeditions to penetrate as far south and east as fuel allowed in the hope of luring German fighters into combat. The second was to provide bomber escort. As a general rule the RAF bombed by night, the USAAF (the combined command of the United States Army and Air Forces) by day. The fighter cover we provided was therefore usually for the massed formations of American bombers, mostly Flying Fortresses, as they went on daylight raids into northern Europe.
I always felt the highest admiration for the crews of the daylight bombers, and at this time the Americans were particularly vulnerable. The range of the Spitfire was unfortunately too limited for us to be able to cover them for more than the first and least dangerous part of their missions. During the most hazardous part, when they were farthest from home, they had to rely on their own defences. These were formidable in their own way. They were heavily armed and the formations they adopted were designed to allow for the maximum cross-fire. This could be surprisingly effective, but the lack of a fighter escort left them highly vulnerable to air attack and the casualties they took were intimidating. By a later stage of the war the development of long-range fighters would help to redress the balance, but the role of the daylight bomber was always particularly hazardous. In fact the role of all bombers, day or night, was indescribably dangerous, and there was a constant awareness among the fighter pilots that we were incredibly lucky to be facing our own risks with at least the illusion of having a measure of personal control over our destinies.
The Spitfire continued on its evolutionary course throughout the war, a story eloquently told from a personal viewpoint by Jeffrey Quill in his Spitfire: A Test Pilot’s Story. Not long after I arrived at Kenley the new Mark IX began to be introduced into service. The Germans had gained an edge with the Focke-Wulf 190, and although they could never quite touch the Spitfire for manoeuvrability, they were superior in speed and climb above 20,000ft, a crucial altitude where much fighter activity took place. They were also beginning to introduce their new high-altitude Junkers 86R bombers, which were capable of attacking their targets from altitudes above 40,000ft, where none of the earlier marks of Spitfire could reach them. The Spitfire Mark IX was designed to combat both these threats.
Aero engines, like car engines and human beings, are aspirated. In other words they need to breathe oxygen to stay alive. Internal-combustion engines gulp in air, mix it with vaporised fuel to form a nice explosive mixture, and then squirt this into the cylinders. There it is compressed to give it even more vigour before it is ignited by the spark plugs. The resultant explosions provide the energy to drive the machine. Aero engines, however, have one unique problem which becomes evident if they have to operate in the higher reaches of the atmosphere. The higher they fly, the thinner the air. Less air means weaker explosions, which means less power, which means performance dropping away sharply at the upper reaches.
This effect would have mattered little if fighter pilots could have chosen their operational altitude. Unfortunately the height at which we flew was dictated by other factors, including the task in hand. If you were escorting bombers, for instance, it was essential for you to stay in close contact. It was also important to fly as high as possible to avoid being jumped by the enemy. The bombers normally flew at somewhere around 15,00ft, which automatically nudged the escorting fighters up into the bracket of 20,000ft or over, with performance dropping away noticeably.
Where there were no such restrictions imposed by operational needs, then fighter pilots were free to choose their own altitudes within the parameters of weather and objectives, but a fighter prowling on the hunt for the enemy instinctively tended to fly at the top of its performance range. Height advantage could be crucial. For one thing there was the extra speed you gained as you dived to engage. For another there was the chance it gave you to appear without warning out of the sun, invisible to the enemy till the last moment, as we all knew well from having watched Errol Flynn in The Dawn Patrol. Superior performance at altitude had a priceless tactical advantage.
Another gimmick of Mother Nature’s to be exploited to the full was the condensation or so-called ‘con-trail’. Today the whole world is familiar with the fine white lines drawn across the sky as commercial jetliners ply their aerial routes. These trails occur in certain quite common meteorological conditions when moisture in the engine exhaust gases condenses and turns into a highly visible cloud-like vapour laid down along the aircraft’s track. The appropriate conditions normally occur between 20,000 and 30,000ft in bands of around 5,000ft in depth, which are quite invisible until you hit them and ‘start smoking’. They give no advance hint of their presence and begin and finish abruptly. In the classic phrase of the conjuror, ‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’ Mysterious or not, they provided a handy alarm system for wartime pilots. As soon as you hit one you could drop to fly just below it, which meant no enemy plane could jump you from above with out giving away its intention. Alternatively, you could climb through the band to the clear air above and prowl in the hope that, if you spotted an enemy aircraft below, you could build up enough speed as you dived back through to retain an element of surprise even with your smoke trail. Either way they were an important tactical factor in the battle craft of the fighter pilot.
The constant modifications to fighter aircraft on both sides were mostly small improvements here and there, which more or less kept them abreast of one another in general increased performance. With the Mark IX, however, the geniuses at Rolls-Royce, who made the Merlin engines that powered our Spitfires – and, indeed, most of our front-line aircraft – came up with a truly significant development: a two-stage supercharger that was to revolutionise performance. In the estimation of Jeffrey Quill himself, it was ‘a quantum jump’ in design and function.
Most aero engines were supercharged, or ‘blown’. That is to say, they were fitted with fans that forced air into the engines faster than it could be drawn out by the normal ‘breathing’ process. For the Mark IX, Rolls-Royce produced the Merlin 61, an engine that operated in two stages, the first to boost power at sea level in the normal way, the second to come into operation at around 15,000ft, just as the ordinary power level began to fail.
As the new planes began to come off the production line, the first batch was allocated to No.64 Squadron at Hornchurch in June. Other distributions followed, and happily for me it was the turn of the Kenley wing in August, when No.402 Squadron was equipped with Spitfire IXs. Naturally, as Wing Commander Flying, I lost no time in appropriating one of the new aircraft for myself, on the grounds that it was among the perks of the job. ‘Wingco’s flying’ had their own aircraft identified by their initials painted on the side as well as their own call signs. Mine were always identified by the letters ‘BK’, and for convenience I used my Christian name ‘Brian’ as call sign. For one thing, it would be unlikely to slip my memory, even in a moment of turmoil.
The first time I flew the Mark IX I could hardly believe the experience. The effect was magical. I had expected an increase in power, but nothing to match the reality. To enhance the dramatic effect, the second stage cut in automatically without warning. One minute there I was, relaxed and peaceful, as I climbed at a leisurely pace towards 15,000ft, anticipating a small surge of extra power as I hit the magic number. The next minute it was as though a giant hand had grabbed hold of me, cradled me in its palm like a shot-putter and given me the most terrific shove forwards and upwards. The shock was so great that I almost bailed out. It literally took my breath away. It was exhilarating, a feeling I could never forget. I yearned at once for a chance to demonstrate this astonishing new tool to the Germans.
It so happened that the arrival of the Mark IXs coincided with the last days of the American Eagle squadrons, whose origins went back to the days when Britain first declared war and a number of adventurous young Americans enlisted in the RAF and were trained as pilots. To begin with they were scattered among the RAF squadrons, alongside the volunteers from the Dominions and Europe, and treated as normal RAF personnel. They wore RAF uniforms with identifying shoulder flashes and were subject to RAF discipline. Later, when the urge for national identification understandably took hold, most young men from the Dominions and the Allied nations were withdrawn and formed into squadrons of their own national identities. The United States had not yet come into the war, however. A compromise therefore needed to be arrived at for the American pilots and they were formed into three new squadrons which took the impressive title of ‘Eagle’. No.71 Squadron was stationed at Debden, No.121 was at North Weald and No.133 was at Biggin Hill.
The Eagles continued to wear RAF uniform and to be subject to RAF discipline, but at least they had their own identity, and very dashing it sounded while chatting up the ladies. When, after Pearl Harbor, the United States officially declared war on Germany and Japan, she naturally had a need for these battle-hardened pilots in her own air force. In theory they were given the choice of whether to remain with British units or transfer to the USAAF, and several chose not to transfer, despite the better pay and conditions. Others came under considerable pressure to transfer, among them ‘Red’ McColpin, the leader of 133 Squadron.
On the morning of the last day before the Eagle squadrons were disbanded, Batchy sent for me. ‘Nice cushy number for you today,’ he announced. ‘A farewell and thank you to the Eagle squadrons.’
Someone had thought up the idea that we should mark the occasion with a gentle, danger-free romp in the air over northern France with an operation that would include the only Eagle squadron to have been re-equipped with the Mark IXs, No.133, by now transferred to Great Sampford in Essex pending its dissolution. Accompanying the Eagles would be No.64 Squadron from Hornchurch and No.401 (Canadian) Squadron from Kenley. And a gentle and carefree jaunt it would have been had fickle Mother Nature not decided to spring one of her desperate surprises.
Our orders were straightforward. The three chosen squadrons were to fly from their respective bases to come together at a temporary landing strip at Bolt Head, the second most southerly point of Devon. There we would be given final details of route and timing. Subject to these, the three squadrons were then to fly as a wing, which I would lead. The general plan was to fly due south to Morlaix, a German fighter airfield on the north coast of the Brest peninsula, where we would meet up with a squadron of American B-17 Flying Fortresses. The heavy bombers would then drop their loads on the Morlaix airfield before heading for home. Unless there were enemy activity, we could bid them goodbye at this stage, call back at Bolt Head to refuel, then return to our respective bases. The operation would give the Eagle pilots a chance to baptise their Spitfire IXs at minimum risk – a fitting farewell gesture.
The first snag occurred when Batchy sent for me just as I was about to take off with No.401 Squadron. I told Keith Hodson, the tall Canadian squadron leader, to make his way to Devon without me, and I would follow as soon as I could. But Batchy held me up for longer than expected, and by the time I was in the air and hot-footing it to Devon the three squadrons were already briefed and waiting to take off from Bolt Head. Tony Gaze, the leader of the third squadron, No.64 from Hornchurch, was an experienced and competent pilot. I therefore told him that he had better take over from me as wing leader since there was no time left for me to be briefed. I would then take over the leadership of the Canadian squadron to act as ‘top cover’, with the Eagle squadron in the middle. A British pilot, Gordon Brettell, had been temporarily delegated to lead them when McColpin found himself on the receiving end of a set of heavy orders from the American top brass to go to London to liaise on the transfer, despite making every protest that he wished to stay put with his squadron until it had seen the Morlaix raid through.
As soon as I had fuelled up we took off again and got into formation before heading south in a gradual climb towards Morlaix. We had been flying for hardly more than five or ten minutes before a layer of cloud began to gather below us. It was thick and mountainous and the sea was entirely concealed by the time we were halfway across the Channel. For twenty-five minutes or so we continued climbing steadily until we had reached to around 20,000ft and were, by our calculations, directly above the French coast. We then went into a gentle orbit as we began to scan about us for the Flying Fortresses. At first the skies seemed empty, but then I spotted them a long way to the south, little more than dots on the horizon and evidently forced up by the towering clouds to much the same altitude as the one we were holding. The first thought to occur to us was that it was odd they should be so far from the target area, but even as we watched they wheeled round to the north-east and began to head for home. Evidently the exceptional cloud cover had made them decide to abandon the operation. For a while we kept them under observation to make sure they were safely on their way, and then turned north and homewards ourselves.
We flew due north for thirty-five minutes, by which time we expected to be within spitting distance of the English coast. But something seemed weirdly adrift. Still the towering cumulus cloud stretched below us with no sign of a break. Our flight southwards had included a slow climb to 20,000ft. Returning northwards we were flying straight and level and consequently covering more ground. We should have been finding the sky over the English coast more or less as we had left it an hour before – that is to say, clear.
Another curious aspect was that, try as we might, we could raise no response from ground control. On the way out we had maintained radio silence to avoid alerting enemy monitoring stations to our presence. This was standard procedure. But now we were as good as home and the need for radio silence was long gone. Ground control would be listening out for us. Their failure to respond was baffling.
Yet while ground control’s obstinate silence certainly fretted me, it was the clouds that worried me more. The former could conceivably have been caused by a technical hitch or a gremlin in the works; the latter was another question altogether. Weather can be changeable, clouds can build up quickly, but the junction of two weather systems is generally a well-defined, recognisable area. There is a slow change of character from clear skies to wisps of low stratus cloud, and these thicken and build into towering cumulus only gradually. It was just such a junction of weather systems that we had flown through on our outward journey. By now we should have been able to see it again if we were anywhere near the English coast. There was something more to this than a niggling instinct; my reason told me decisively what we ought to have been finding and the home skies should still have been clear. In the hour or so we had been airborne it would have been quite impossible for the weather to change so dramatically in character, or for it to have moved so far.
There was still no response from ground control. My mental alarm bells were beginning to sound insistently when all at once a small break appeared dramatically between the mighty towers of cumulus directly below. Through the gap there showed a small section of rugged south-facing coast with cliffs and headlands, identical in character and appearance to the stretch of Devon coast around Bolt Head. With whoops of joy the two other squadrons peeled away and dived down through the gap. I was sorely tempted to follow, but still found myself hesitating. Perhaps I was being too clever by half. The time element alongside the fact that the coast was south facing surely confirmed that this could be nowhere else but Devon. There could not be another south coast within a hundred miles. Nevertheless the inconsistent weather pattern and ground control’s sphinx-like silence continued to feed my profound unease. I decided that 401 Squadron ought to press on.
Fuel conservation was essential by this stage. Hitherto we had not troubled ourselves, since the operation as planned was a very short one, but the Spitfire’s only shortcoming was its limited fuel capacity. Depending on how ham-fisted you were with the throttle – and, as the saying went, in action you were either ham-fisted or dead – your flying range was somewhere between two and a quarter and two and a half hours. By this time we had been in the air for over an hour and a half without giving any consideration to fuel conservation. It would be a shrewd move for us to begin treating our throttles very tenderly. This was easier for me as formation leader than it was for the others. They had to keep station, an exercise in which the throttle played a central role.
Mentally I fired off a quick message to St Christopher, invaluable saint of the traveller, and we continued north. A handful of minutes later a most unholy racket broke out on the RT. ‘For God’s sake, ground control,’ came a cacophony of American voices, ‘for God’s sake stop those bloody Pongos’ – air force slang for the army – ‘shooting at us! We’re trying to land and the stupid buggers won’t stop firing!’
It caused me little concern, apart from thinking that they were having no more luck with ground control than we were. Like the navy, the army was deeply suspicious of anything with wings, and also tended to blast off as a reflex and only afterwards begin to ask some questions. They seldom did real damage, but they were capable of putting you through an alarming experience. Still ground control kept silent, and did nothing to clarify our own situation, or tell us who those Wyatt Earps might be banging away somewhere far below us. Soon the clamour died away.
We continued northwards, remaining above solid cloud, and still the airwaves were empty of sound over the RT. I decided our only option was to go down through the weather and hope the clouds had no hard centres, but just at that moment they started to thin, then began to change slowly back to the low-level stratus we had passed on the way out. The relief was huge, overwhelming. Here was the weather pattern for which I had been watching, the indication that we were at last well on the way home. Expectantly I waited as the cloud slowly melted away, confident that when it finally cleared we would see ahead of us the friendly, beckoning shores of England. And the cloud did clear – yet all that was visible in front of us was an endless expanse of ocean stretching as far as the eye could reach till it merged with a hazy horizon. My mental alarm bells jangled deafeningly.
By now instinct and reason were truly at loggerheads. The south coast I had rejected well over an hour earlier, reason now insisted could only have been Devon. This meant we had overflown the western peninsula and must be somewhere above the Irish Sea on our way to the Irish Republic. Instinct disagreed, but could produce no logical arguments to say why. Reason therefore pointed out that we had flown south for half an hour, then north for nearly an hour and a half – almost three times as long – and here we were, still over water. Ergo, this had to be the Irish Sea. No other location would fit the puzzle. It seemed the time had come to give way to reason before writing off our entire squadron of brand new beautiful Mark IXs.
Clearly the situation was desperate. Within the next half-hour we would begin to drop one by one into the drink – literally, since we would all have to bail out. In the early days I had taken it for granted that a Spitfire could ditch in the sea without difficulty, skim along the surface and come to rest before slowly submerging. During the Battle of Britain I always planned, in a lackadaisical way, that if I ever were shot down over London, I would ditch in the Thames as close to the Embankment entrance of the Savoy as possible. My calculation was that, with fighter pilots briefly being the flavour of the month while the risk of invasion was uppermost in the public mind, someone would then proceed to buy me lunch. This congenial fantasy was brought to an unceremonious close when I got to know Norman Ryder, the only person I ever did meet who survived ditching a Spitfire at sea.
Norman, an experienced pilot, gave a hair-raising account of the incident after he was brought down in the Channel. The impact itself, comparable to hitting a brick wall at 80mph, was enough to daze him even with his seat belts tightly fastened. Then, within seconds of touching the surface, he was shot downwards into water so deep that the light was snuffed out as if a switch had been thrown. He found himself disorientated, semi-conscious and in total darkness. Fortunately he had managed to jettison his cock pit canopy before hitting, and somehow, groping blindly, he managed to undo his belts and other attachments and struggle out of the cockpit with straining lungs. Once he was free, the in-built buoyancy of his Mae West shot him to the surface, where he arrived in a sorry state and lucky to be alive. The fact was that the Spitfire’s extremely nose-heavy characteristic meant that, as soon as it hit the water, the nose dug in, the tail shot up and the aircraft dived to the bottom like a gannet on the hunt. Norman’s vivid narrative cured me of any inclination to ditch in any circumstances.
Time was meanwhile running out for 401 Squadron; all the odds seemed stacked against instinct. Nevertheless I could not rid myself of the feeling that there was a joker in the pack some where. Since the onset of war I had been flying operationally virtually without a break. Long experience in any field develops a sort of sixth sense, a feeling for when things are right and when they are not. Perhaps it was time, after all, for instinct to defy logic. The gut reaction I now had was not to be denied. With my heart in my mouth I decided to go for broke. We would press on.
At that very moment the earphones started to crackle. Miraculously, from out of the blue, so faint as to be almost inaudible, came the sweetest sound ever: ‘Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. This is ground control. Are you receiving me? Over.’
‘Hello, ground control. This is Brian. Where the hell’ve you been the last two hours?’
‘Hello, Brian. You’ve been off Fighter Command’s board most of that time. Where the hell’ve you been? You’re still eighty miles south of base. Fly due north, and for God’s sake watch your fuel! Over.’
As if I needed telling! But still eighty miles south! What on earth had been going on here? It was no time for rumination, but at least we knew our direction now. The crucial task was to get everyone home intact if I could. Luckily we still had plenty of altitude, so we throttled back to the minimum revs needed to keep airborne, and in due course let down slowly in long, shallow, powered glides towards Bolt Head. The airfield was laid out at the edge of quite sheer granite cliffs, and an off-shore wind meant we had to land towards them. As I came in on my final approach I expected each second to hear the engine cut and anticipated ending as an ephemeral scar on those impervious granite walls. But as squadron leader I had needed to work my throttle less than the others and in fact still had a few gallons in hand. The engines of two other aircraft stopped as they touched down, and one pilot had to bale out just short of the coast.
In all the circumstances I felt we had come off fairly lightly, though the incident overall was an unmitigated disaster. The two other squadrons had got down safely through that gap in the clouds but then they became separated. It had not taken Tony Glaze too long to realise they were, after all, still over France, and he at once headed north with his squadron and arrived back safely, though he shed several aircraft on the way as a result of fuel shortage.
The real tragedy concerned the Eagle squadron. Believing themselves to be safely back over England, they began to search for somewhere to land. The cacophony of protests we had heard over the RT was caused not by entrepreneurial British gunners having a bash but by German artillery about its legitimate business as the Eagles inadvertently entered the heavily defended air space over Brest.
Those who were not shot down subsequently had to force-land or else to bail out as they ran out of fuel. As a result, a couple or so of our brand-new top-secret Spitfires Mark IX came down intact and handed the German aero-engineers and pilots one of their handsomest free gifts of the war. For the RAF it was a serious blow. It dramatically shortened the margin of time in which we were able to enjoy the huge advantage of our two-stage blowers. Of the twelve Eagle pilots, one had had to turn back with engine trouble soon after take-off. Four were killed and six were taken prisoner, including Gordon Brettell, who was sadly among the fifty Allied prisoners of war shot after the attempted mass escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944. The twelfth pilot crash-landed in France, but managed to evade capture and made it back to Britain.
The post-mortem to this truly sad and tragic tale produced little in the way of concrete explanation. Everybody knew that three Spitfire squadrons and one Flying Fortress squadron had ended up well over a hundred miles south of where they should have been, but no one could say why. When the Spitfires assumed they were over the French coast, they were in reality over the Bay of Biscay; and when we first spotted the Flying Fortresses, they must have been well on their way to Gibraltar. Indeed, as we heard later, one of them landed there, and the rest dumped their bombs somewhere over the Pyrenees before returning home. The coast we had glimpsed through a hole in the cloud on our way back was not the south coast of Devon but the Brest peninsula, and the airfield where the Eagles landed was needless to say a German installation in occupied France. The junction of the two weather systems which I had been watching out for had drifted to the south, increasing the gap between it and the English coast. In terms of flying time it only represented ten or fifteen minutes, but it caused us anxiety with our critical fuel situation. Ground control’s failure to respond was simply because we were way beyond their RT range. Everything was thus neatly explained, except for the most important question of all. How had it happened in the first place?
It took some years for any plausible explanation to be forthcoming. After Frank Whittle’s jet engine made high altitude the most economic space to fly in, and ultimately the busiest aerial highway for the commercial airliners, a phenomenon was encountered which came to be known as ‘jet stream’. This extraordinary meteorological sport of nature is a freak band of air occasionally encountered at altitudes of anything above 20,000ft, and it moves at speeds of well over 100mph. This, it was concluded, must be the answer to what had happened to us on that September day in 1942. With such a freak gale up our tails, and ten-tenths cloud cover below, we could with ease have overflown the Brest peninsula and motored well into the Bay of Biscay without realising it. By another fluke, the gap in the clouds on the way back happened to open up above a strip of coastline that deceptively resembled the coast of south Devon.
As for the Flying Fortresses, they had reached the target area ahead of us and, forced up to the critical altitude by the cloud, must have hit the jet stream before we did. This would have accounted for their being so far to the south of us; also for their being still deep in enemy territory when we believed them to be safely back in friendly skies and left them. Fortunately they were never intercepted by enemy fighters, though even if they had been the dense cloud cover would have provided ample cover for them to escape.
So, to the best of my belief, ‘jet stream’ was finally officially accepted as the cause of the disaster. It was also believed to be the first recorded encounter with this mysterious force. As a last foot note, it also emerged in time that the transfer of McColpin under protest had rendered No.133 (Eagle) Squadron demoralised and weakened at the critical moment. The planning of their mission had left a certain amount to be desired and there were gaps in their briefing and communications. It was the fatal combination of a casual approach to discipline and a freak weather condition which no one fully understood that had turned a simple jaunt into a calamity.
There was one interesting sequel to this story. Many years later I was in Washington, one of a small group of RAF and Luftwaffe pilots lecturing at the Smithsonian Museum. At the end of my lecture, while I was still on the platform, an American walked up and called me by name. ‘You won’t remember me,’ he said. ‘In fact we never actually met.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘I started out with the Eagle squadron on that Morlaix raid from Bolt Head,’ he explained. ‘I was the one that took off with the squadron but had to turn back after a few minutes with engine trouble and crash-landed near Kingsbridge. I guess you could say I was lucky.’
I guessed I could.
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The seven months I spent as wing leader at Kenley were mostly occupied with routine fighter operations over France. Apart from the Morlaix raid, the only one I recall as being in any way a break from routine was the Dieppe landing, scheduled at the time as a dress rehearsal for D-Day. Apart from the importance of the occasion, to us it seemed just another straightforward air-cover job, protecting the ground and sea forces from air attack. On the ground the Dieppe raid was a different matter: another tragic fiasco. The German forces somehow got wind of the operation and were ready and waiting. The Allied troops, mostly Canadian, were met by a pulverising wall of fire as they scrambled ashore from the landing barges. The casualties they took were horrific. It was a disaster for the ground forces, and for us another frustrating occasion when we were in the air above them but almost powerless to help. We could protect them from air attack, we could strafe enemy transport and gun positions provided we could find them. Apart from that the constant movement of skirmishing troops locked in a land battle made intervention as dangerous for our own men as it would have been for the enemy. In the euphemism of this more modern age, they would have been highly vulnerable to ‘friendly fire’. It was said that a naval officer who saw the events at first hand called it ‘a naval version of the charge of the Light Brigade’.
For some unfathomable reason never explained it was decided that the Kenley wing would, for the Dieppe operation, operate from Lympne, an airfield in the south-east corner of Kent. Kenley would have been as handy as Lympne for reaching Dieppe, but no one moaned since it made a pleasant change. For two or three days we found ourselves billeted at Port Lympne, the country house of the former MP and Under Secretary of State for Air, Sir Philip Sassoon. Any mention of Dieppe has for me always had the effect of mixing up sharply contrasting memories between the action on the beachhead,’ the carnage and tragedy, with Sir Philip’s spectacular house and its terraced gardens with views across Romney Marsh, and the black marble bathrooms with sunken baths and friezes with black cherubs being chased by black satyrs to what ends one could only guess. Until his death in 1939 Sir Philip had been a dazzling figure on the social scene, and the house was built as a backdrop to his activities as a host to the high and mighty. Herbert Baker, the architect he picked to design it, possessed, in the opinion of the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, ‘a positive genius for errors of design; in his public buildings every proportion, every cornice, every piece of fenestration was (and unfortunately still is) an object lesson in how not to do it’.
One other fond memory of my Kenley days was far removed from aerial activity. It concerned Douglas Watkins, the amiable young commander of one of the squadrons, who became a good friend until he died too soon after the war from a simple operation that went wrong. One evening he and two comrades in arms, Emanuel and Michael, decided to slip into town for a few drinks. To achieve the expedition they borrowed the squadron transport, a small Singer pick-up van such as most squadrons used as general run-arounds – busy little vehicles with canvas tops that rolled back and tail-boards that hinged downwards, leaving a flat platform behind. Douglas drove, with Emanuel and Michael sit ting in the back. Leaning in a corner of the van was a single-barrel twelve-bore shotgun and some cartridges, part of the clay-pigeon shooting equipment which fighter squadrons used to keep their eyes in sharp condition while waiting to be scrambled.
As the trio was about to make its way home again, suitably refreshed, it occurred to Emanuel and Michael that their vision and reflexes would be immeasurably improved by a little practice from a moving gun platform, just like the one, for instance, on which they found themselves riding at this moment. And what better targets could there be than the traffic lights so conveniently to hand? Sitting in the back, legs dangling over the tailboard, they began to blast away at each set of traffic lights as they swept passed. It was fortunate that at this stage of the war the streets after dark were pretty well empty. Few people went out for the evenings, because there was nowhere to go, and if you did go out the rationing meant there would very likely be nothing to eat or drink. There were no street lights, virtually no pedestrians or other traffic, and never the smallest chink of light from any building. Even the traffic lights were hooded. The van was travelling through a dark, deserted world.
All went well until they passed a light which seemed unusually low. Nonetheless it was about the right size and the right shade of red, so they let fly. The response was a yell as the light dropped to the ground and shattered on the pavement. In some bemusement they ground to a halt to investigate. Far from being a traffic light, it had been a red warning lamp carried by a night watchman, who was now clutching his groin and expressing pain and indignation in loud and voluble tones. Thoroughly alarmed, they rushed the poor man round to the local hospital before returning to base, chastened and sober.
The next morning Batchy telephoned the hospital for an up dated bulletin before giving orders to convene a meeting of all officers in the officers’ mess that evening. Once he had us all gathered together, he told us we had been very lucky indeed – and so had the watchman. He’d been peppered in the unmentionables, as we already knew from Emanuel and Michael, but by sheer good fortune only very lightly. There was no serious or permanent damage. Just the same, Batchy thought we owed the poor chap more than a mere apology. The appropriate gesture, he suggested, would be a whip-around to raise £100 for the inconvenience he had been caused.
There was a bit of a stunned silence. The sum of £100 was enormous at that time, when fully qualified pilots were paid the equivalent of 70p for a twenty-four-hour day. Nobody felt like arguing, however, and especially not Emanuel or Michael, who correctly felt they were getting off extremely lightly. In due course we heard that the night watchman was delighted and almost went so far as to offer himself for target practice any time one of us might be passing. Here was one incident at least that could have ended in disaster and tragedy but which instead arrived at a relatively light-hearted conclusion.
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Dear Batchy survived the war, in which I served with him not only at Kenley but also in the Desert Air Force (DAF), where he had command of the mobile operations unit that exercised air control of the DAF fighter wings. He was another, however, who died ahead of schedule. His death was another that could easily have been postponed, except that it would have meant him step ping out of character. As a bachelor, living on his own apart from the elderly housekeeper who looked after him, he developed a minor heart ailment. It was nothing serious – something that could easily have been rectified by seeing a doctor. But seeing doctors was not Batchy’s style. It was months, even years, before his housekeeper became alarmed and took it on herself to send for one. Batchy was packed off to hospital at once, but very soon, again entirely in character, he felt he was in danger of dying from boredom and discharged himself. Not long afterwards he died from his heart condition.
I visited him once or twice while he was still in hospital, but the last time I saw him was soon after he had asserted his right to end his days in freedom. I had booked Batchy to be a godfather to my daughter Sam before she was even born, and a few days after her first birthday there came a knock one evening, quite late, on the door of our London flat. I opened the door and there stood Batchy. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I hope my goddaughter’s at home. I’ve brought her a belated birthday present.’
And he handed me a gift-wrapped bottle of single-malt whisky. Batchy was one of the Royal Air Force great originals who truly justified the old cliché, ‘a legend in his time’. I felt glad he had stayed in character till the end.