CHAPTER 11
When those young boys from New Zealand and Australia first laid eyes on an aircraft they were smitten. For a handful, like John Gard’ner, Alan Deere and Gordon Olive, their dreams of flight would be realised but under conditions they could never have imagined. For many of the Anzacs, the fulfilment of their aspiration to fly was only made possible by entering into a dangerous pact. Many of the antipodeans would never have been airmen had it not been for the RAF’s mid-1930s expansion in the face of Hitler’s unsettling militarisation of Germany. Whitehall’s fears of a major European war placed Dominion men in the cockpits of advanced aircraft in Britain. In other words, Anzac airmen, wittingly or unwittingly, had entered into a bargain that, while offering them the possibility of fulfilling their dreams, placed them at the sharp end of the spear when war broke out.
From the farms and cities of the Pacific Dominions, these young men came to be included among a select few who determined the course of the Second World War and the future of twentieth-century Europe. The Battle of Britain was, as George Orwell reflected in a 1942 radio broadcast, as important as the Battle of Trafalgar. Just as Admiral Lord Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon’s forces had repelled the perfidious French-Spanish enemy from England’s shores, so had the men of Hugh Dowding’s Fighter Command thwarted Hitler’s malignant plans for Western Europe. One light of democracy and decency had not been extinguished. And although it took another five years to win the war, it was at any rate certain that ‘Britain could not be conquered in one blow’.[1] Since the outbreak of war, Germany had ridden roughshod over Europe: it had subjugated Poland; invaded Denmark and Norway; and overrun the Low Countries and France. The Battle of Britain demonstrated, for the first time, that Hitler could be checked.
Down through the years Hitler’s commitment to an actual invasion has been questioned and others have suggested that the threat posed by the Royal Navy would have thwarted Operation Sea Lion. The problem with these hypothetical arguments is that they were never tested because the men of Fighter Command did deny Hitler his prerequisite for an invasion: aerial superiority. With that, Germany was faced with the two-front war it had hoped to avoid. The action of July–October 1940, and its attendant British resistance, siphoned off German resources on a massive scale: the construction and manning of the Atlantic Wall; laying siege to Albion via the Battle of Atlantic; contesting British dominance in the Mediterranean; and, eventually, defending the cities of the Third Reich against massed raids by Allied bombers. Cumulatively, these theatres sapped Germany of men and material that might well have been better deployed where the war in Europe would ultimately be decided: the Eastern Front.
Fighter Command’s victory also made D-Day possible. Although the entry of the United States into the war was dependent on events in the Pacific, the continued resistance of Britain meant that Washington was able to pursue a ‘Europe First’ policy that would not have been possible otherwise. The British Isles was a vast staging post for the Allied build-up that culminated in the Normandy landings. The 1944 assault on the Atlantic Wall gave the Allies the foothold they needed to liberate France, push into Germany, and finally join up with the Red Army advancing from the east. Without D-Day, the Soviets might well have won the war on the Continent alone, and the consequences of a communist-dominated Europe would have been dire for the peoples of Western Europe. The jackboots of Nazism would merely have been replaced by the hobnailed boots of Stalinist communism, with its attendant economic collectivism, secret police and political repression. The Battle of Britain led to the securing of democracy in Western Europe in the post-war decades.
All the more remarkable is the fact that so much hinged on the fighting skills and sacrifice of such a diminutive force. The nearly four-month-long Battle of Britain taken alone appears insignificant compared with other campaigns in the European war. The air battle from mid-July to late October probably accounted for the lives of no more than 5000 military combatants.[2] By some estimates, the Russian Front consumed over five times as many lives every single day over a three-year period, leaving more than 30 million soldiers and civilians dead in its wake. Yet the Battle of Britain was significant out of all proportion to its limited duration and relatively small number of participants. Churchill’s praise for his airmen—‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’—became increasingly prescient in the Cold War decades that followed the Second World War.
The New Zealanders and Australians who took part in the campaign made up only a small portion of Dowding’s nearly 3000 airmen. Of these, 574 were Commonwealth and foreign pilots and gunners. Leading this group were the Poles with 145 men, followed closely by 134 New Zealanders. The Australians came in as the fifth-largest contingent with 37 airmen behind the Canadians (112) and Czechs (88), but ahead of the Belgians (28), South Africans (25) and a series of smaller cohorts from around the world. In all, the Anzacs made up a full quarter of the Commonwealth and foreign aircrew numbers. Spread across Fighter Command, the Anzacs were part of an extraordinarily multinational fighting force. It was not uncommon for the Anzacs to find themselves in squadrons that included not only a large number of English, Scottish and Irish pilots or gunners, but also a healthy smattering of Poles, Czechs, South Africans and sometimes the odd Frenchman or even American.[3]
Identifying an Anzac at an airfield would have been difficult but not impossible. Though they were part of an international fighting force, they maintained a sense of national identity in numerous ways. The most obvious was the Australian allegiance to the dark-blue RAAF uniform. Although on formal occasions Australian pilots were required to dress in their RAF attire, the pilots who, like Olive, had been trained at Point Cook, Victoria, were entitled to wear the Australian kit for normal duties. The desire to don the RAAF blue was so strong that even pilots who technically were not entitled to often did so. William Millington was not an RAAF graduate but clothed himself in the dark blue regardless. Uniforms were worn until threadbare and then, where possible, replaced by another RAAF set, often purchased at the on-station estate auction of a recently deceased Australian airman.[4]
The Kiwis invariably wore the RAF uniform but on occasion differentiated themselves from their peers with suitable Kiwiana markings on their machines. Deere named three successive Spitfires ‘Kiwi’ until it occurred to him that, given his string of accidents, he was courting bad luck. ‘Kiwi 3’ was the last incarnation in the series and thereafter his Spitfires went moniker-less. Humphreys painted a Maori tiki on the side of his Hurricane and Lawrence the Maori greeting ‘Kia ora’. It is highly unlikely any Luftwaffe pilots understood the phrase, let alone the irony of a friendly salutation announcing the imminent arrival of a hail of decidedly unfriendly machine-gun bullets. It is unclear if Australian pilots painted national emblems or wrote Aussie colloquialisms on their engine cowlings during the Battle of Britain, but it is possible, as in the preceding French campaign John Cock and Desmond Sheen festooned their fighters with Australiana, the latter painting a boomerang on his machine.[5]
Aside from these external badges of nationalism, what also differentiated the Anzacs from many of their British peers was their healthy disrespect for the RAF’s lingering class system. Initially, resistance to the so-called colonials was weakened by the fact that British officers were never quite certain as to where in the social order the boys from the Dominions should be slotted. Moreover, it was difficult to ignore the considerable athletic prowess of many colonials. As Deere found out first-hand, it was hard to dismiss you when you had just thrashed a selection of the best that the English public schools had to offer. In time, the Anzacs’ flying abilities more than compensated for their far-flung origins. It was impossible to look down on a pilot, even one as unathletic as Colin Gray, when he was one of the campaign’s highest-scoring pilots. Moreover, the gradual loss of a unit’s founding members diluted the class-bound tendencies of even the most elite squadrons. In the end what mattered was the fighting ability of the pilots and the necessity of working together. ‘There was a bit of banter between the Canadians and Aussies or the New Zealanders,’ recalled Lawrence, ‘but ... we were always a great team.’[6]
While the Anzacs recognised and abided by the conventions that separated the commissioned officers from sergeants in the squadrons, they were in no way overawed by this and of course, as happened with most pilots, the segregation by rank on the ground dissolved once airborne. With a good deal of Anzac pluck, Emeny broke with convention and was able to secure himself and his colleagues their sergeants’ stripes. One noncommissioned officer said of Carbury: ‘Brian had no time for ... senseless class distinction and fraternised with the NCOs and other ranks, probably to the consternation of his seniors—it certainly surprised me.’[7] A general egalitarian ethos extended to the cooks that provisioned them and the ground crew that serviced their machines. When Deere saved a seat right near the front of the Windmill Girls’ on-base show for his mechanic, he was expressing a general view held by the Anzacs that their own success was based in good part on the efforts of armourers and fitters as much as on those of the pilots themselves. As Irving Smith recalled, the ‘ground crews of all ranks were absolutely marvellous. They worked all hours, ever cheerful, willing and very competent indeed.’
Among their fellow airmen of all nationalities the New Zealanders and Australians were recognised as worthy brothers-in-arms and, on occasion, exceptional air-power practitioners. The Battle of Britain was one of the few times when Anzacs made a contribution to the success of an entire campaign not just with men in the air or on the ground, as in North Africa, but also at the highest level of command. New Zealanders and Australian pilots and gunners were well regarded, but the most significant contribution was made by just one man, the commander of 11 Group: Keith Park.
Incredibly, in the backwash of the campaign Park and his boss, Dowding, were shifted sideways. The dispute between Leigh-Mallory and Park, and Dowding’s mismanagement of the quarrel, resulted in a full-scale reshuffle of Fighter Command. Dowding was portrayed as being out of touch and Park unwilling to adopt the so-called offensive stance of his 12 Group colleagues. In November 1940, ‘Stuffy’ was replaced by Big-Wing advocate Sholto Douglas. The former Fighter Command boss was relegated to investigating service wastage.
Park was relieved of 11 Group, which was passed on to Leigh-Mallory, and the Anzac was eventually given a Mediterranean command. In the defence of the most heavily bombed location of the Second World War, the island of Malta, Park once again demonstrated his air-power prowess. At first glance the transfer appeared mean-spirited and revealed a lack of appreciation of the Kiwi’s truly awe-inspiring achievements. Park was undoubtedly New Zealand’s greatest war-time commander and an Anzac whose influence on twentieth-century history is challenged by few contemporaries. As a Great War ace and accomplished pre-war commander, Park was well equipped to face Kesselring and Sperrle. He did of course have the Dowding System on his side and the recent development of radar, but even so he could have squandered his resources or misapplied them to battle, as his erstwhile 12 Group adversary Leigh-Mallory did.
Park had a deft touch with his subordinates. As Hayter simply stated, Park ‘listened to the blokes that were actually doing the job’.[8] Flying constantly between bases in his Hurricane, clothed in his white overalls, the tall Kiwi was keen to glean information from the frontline pilots as they returned from their dogfights over England. ‘He saw the pilots after patrols,’ recalled Kinder, ‘when they had seen their best friends go down in flames. He would have a cigarette and a drink with them, and he was, in return, looked on as one of the boys.’[9] His flying logbook is testament to his hands-on leadership and determination to command from the front.
Historians and military strategists overwhelmingly agree with the New Zealander’s assessment of the campaign and his use of men and material. ‘Park’s performance was extraordinary,’ argued Stephen Bungay, one of the battle’s historians. ‘Throughout the long months of the strain, Park hardly put a foot wrong, making all the major tactical decisions, attending to relevant details, visiting pilots and airfields himself, and fighting an internal political battle.’[10] As well-regarded Second World War ace Johnnie Johnson succinctly noted, Park was ‘the only man who could have lost the war in a day or even an afternoon.’[11] Had he deployed his machines as Leigh-Mallory and Bader were advocating, the campaign might well have been irrecoverable. ‘If any man won the Battle of Britain, he did,’ said Lord Tedder, Marshal of the RAF. ‘I do not believe it is realised how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgement and his skill, did to save, not only this country, but the world.’[12] In the history of aerial fighter warfare few could claim to be his peer and perhaps none is superior.
Park’s airmen in 11 Group and those at his flanks who fought the aerial battle were up against a sizeable and experienced adversary. Luftwaffe airmen had successfully operated in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and then in the invasion of Poland, the Scandinavian campaign and in the triumph over the Low Countries and France. Confident and experienced, they were ordered to bring the RAF to its knees. For their part, they were disadvantaged by Göring’s penchant for changing targets throughout the campaign, and because their aircraft were more suited to close air support than an independent long-range aerial offensive. Faulty intelligence bedevilled planning throughout, as did the loss of so many German airmen shot down over Britain. The failure to discern the importance of the sector stations and the role radar played all aided Dowding’s pilots, Anzac or otherwise. Nevertheless, as good as the Dowding System was, in the end it remained dependent on the individual and collective skill and courage of airmen. In this, the Allied pilots and gunners, including the Anzacs, stymied the Luftwaffe’s attempt to defeat Fighter Command, but at a considerable cost.
In all 1023 Fighter Command machines were lost in the campaign.[13] For its troubles the Luftwaffe lost 1887 aircraft of all types. The loss ratio was close to 1.8:1 in favour of the RAF. As many Luftwaffe commanders recognised at the time, the only way to wipe out Fighter Command as a defensive force was to achieve a much higher kill rate than their adversary. Clearly they missed the mark by a considerable margin. Only on a handful of days in late August were they able to achieve a degree of parity.
In the arena of fighter-on-fighter combat, the figures tip slightly in favour of the Luftwaffe. Overall, the German pilots were able to obtain a 1.2:1 ratio against the RAF. An unsurprising result given the fact that the German Me 109 airmen had only one target, Dowding’s fighters, whilst the Fighter Command boys were divided between knocking out Göring’s bombers and fighters. In particular, Hurricanes striking at bombers were susceptible to the marauding ‘snappers’ lurking above. Nevertheless, this was much lower that the 5:1 target posted by some Luftwaffe commanders at the outset of the campaign. Successes by Me 109 pilots were nowhere near enough to bring Fighter Command to its knees, let alone Churchill to the negotiating table. New Zealander John Mackenzie in a post-war analysis asked, ‘Now what was the measure of Germany’s achievement during the four months of almost continuous attack?’
The campaign hollowed out the Luftwaffe of some of its best airmen. The Germans lost a total of 2698 aircrew to Fighter Command’s 544.[15] The disparity is a reflection of the fact that Allied pilots were attacking multicrewed bombers as well as single-engine fighters, while the Luftwaffe pilots were for the most part assaulting single-crew Spitfires and Hurricanes, with a handful of two-man Defiants thrown into the mix.[16] In other words, Death’s scythe simply had greater opportunities to take the lives of Luftwaffe crews than of RAF pilots. Göring’s force never recovered from the loss of so many experienced aviators. Initial German success in the invasion of Russia papered over the deficit, but in the years that followed the impact of the 1940 losses became increasingly apparent.
By all accounts, the men from New Zealand and Australia more than played their part in this achievement, though as with the general situation across Fighter Command, the actual knocking out of enemy machines was concentrated in the hands of only a few of ‘The Few’. Over the entire Battle of Britain, it is estimated that the greater bulk of the claims were made by a relatively small number of airmen in Fighter Command. By one estimate, about forty per cent of victories were attributable to only five per cent of the pilots.[17] The reasons for this are manifold. In some cases, urgent replacement pilots were quickly ushered from the battlefield soon after arrival either through injury or death at the hands of more experienced Luftwaffe airmen. Their names appear in the Battle’s lists, but their involvement ended prematurely. New Zealander Michael Shand, on only his second sortie, was knocked from the sky. He had never fired a Spitfire’s guns before being hit.
Many Anzacs also found themselves in the handful of Fighter Command squadrons equipped with Defiants or Blenheims and were therefore unlikely to amass impressive kill sheets. Defiant pilots and gunners had a better chance of being shot down themselves than of destroying an enemy machine. The youngest Anzac to die in the Battle of Britain was Kiwi Sergeant Lauritz Rasmussen. In September, only a week after sewing on his air-gunner’s badge, Rasmussen and his Defiant pilot in 264 Squadron were killed. He was only eighteen years old.
The Blenheim crews were mostly restricted to fruitless night-time operations. Notwithstanding the remarkable efforts of Michael Herrick, the greater number of airmen in these circumstances followed a similar path to that of Sergeant Colin Pyne of Nelson, New Zealand, an air-gunner with a Blenheim squadron. The unit’s night patrols did little to deter the enemy and only emphasised the need for advances in airborne radar.[18] Consequently, though he undertook many patrols, Pyne was unable to claim any successes over the course of the campaign. Blenheim pilot Alan Gawith in 23 Squadron had only one brief encounter with a German intruder at night and had waited fourteen months to do so. Some fifty New Zealanders and Australians found themselves in these Defiant and Blenheim-equipped units and for the most part ended the Battle of Britain with similar results.
Not only was the type of machine important but also where the squadron was based. In other words, being at the controls of a single-engine fighter was no guarantee pilots would find themselves in the thick of the action. A good number of Hurricane and Spitfire pilots were either based outside the main area of operations or arrived too late to play a significant role in the fighting. New Zealander Victor de la Perrelle spent the Battle of Britain with his squadron in the defence of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The unit’s main task was escorting convoys and, though it was scrambled on a handful of occasions, saw no combat due to its distance from the actual fighting.[19] The successful pilots who became household names were usually deployed either at the heart, or close to the heart, of the Luftwaffe’s main objectives in south-east England. The region covered by Park’s 11 Group was target-rich and consequently pilots here, or in the adjacent 10 and 12 Groups, were more frequently asked to engage the enemy directly.
Therefore, of all the Anzacs that flew in the Battle of Britain, only a much smaller number had the opportunity to clash with incoming German machines. Of the 134 New Zealanders, only a quarter actually put in a claim for hitting an enemy aircraft and of the 37 Australians the number was closer to half. The Australians’ higher claim rate was due to the fact that, proportionally, they had more men stationed within the main area of operations. In addition, they had only two airmen flying the ill-fated Defiants compared with nineteen Kiwis. Overall, the claim rates for the Anzacs makes impressive reading, and, relative to their numbers in Fighter Command, they made a very valuable contribution to the battle.
The motivation across all pilots varied considerably. In general, although their own countries were not being attacked by the Luftwaffe, many Anzacs saw Britain as the ‘Mother Country’ and had a great deal of sympathy for their British colleagues and, therefore, fought no less determinedly. A few pilots reconciled themselves to their assigned role reluctantly, while many more willingly depressed the firing button, motivated by thoughts of revenge or coldly engaging in a simple ‘them or us’ survival equation.
Farnborough-based test-pilot Arthur Clouston took to the air and shot down two enemy machines driven by the desire to avenge his brother who had died at the hands of the Germans only months before. Pilots who had seen the results of the Stuka dive-bombing of refugees fleeing the German advance in France were under no illusions: it was clear that the Germans were not engaged in a chivalrous jousting match. The Luftwaffe’s deliberate targeting of fleeing refugees in France prior to the Battle of Britain, and then the assault on London’s civilian population during the early days of the Blitz in September, hardened the resolve of many to the task at hand.
This was buttressed by sporadic Luftwaffe attacks on defenceless airmen drifting earthward after baling out of their aircraft. Being shot at in this manner was a significant factor in steeling the resolve of Bob Spurdle, who felt that if the Germans had ‘taken the gloves off’ he was under an obligation to do the same. In the end all pilots agreed that the aerial contest was a zero-sum game: either kill or be killed.
Regardless of their motivation, the more successful of these airmen fitted a fairly standard profile: before the campaign they had completed a long period of flight-time in their respective aircraft types; they had combat experience pre-dating the Battle of Britain; and the squadron to which they belonged had dropped outmoded inter-war fighting tactics and formations. Colin Gray was persuaded that pilots needed at least 100 hours in their respective aircraft types before being thrust into battle. Being handed a Hurricane or Spitfire during the campaign was of little help when a young airman had spent most of the preceding months in an antiquated biplane. Australian John Crossman, with less than twenty hours in a Spitfire, survived just long enough to secure a share in a bomber before he was killed.
Nevertheless, chalking up extensive hours in a single-engine fighter was often in itself insufficient in the white heat of the campaign. Kiwi Terence Lovell-Gregg was a supremely gifted airman. As a teenager he was one of Australasia’s youngest pilots and had been in the RAF since 1931. With considerable inter-war operational experience in Iraq and then as an instructor in England, his insertion as the commanding officer of a squadron in July 1940 should have been straightforward and relatively risk-free. Lovell-Gregg, however, recognised that in spite of his flying abilities, he was inexperienced in this type of combat and more often than not passed operational command to younger, but battle-hardened, subordinates. This undoubtedly saved the lives of others but could not prevent his own demise on Adlertag.
On the other hand, Olive’s flying abilities were augmented by considerable experience gleaned over France in the final days of Hitler’s assault on the trapped Allied forces at Dunkirk. Consequently by the time the Queenslander was facing the German raiders in the high summer of 1940 he had already survived some of the worst air fighting the war would offer and was better equipped to face the battle for the skies over southern England than most.
Fighting Area Attacks and the formation flying of the pre-war years often lingered with squadrons to the disadvantage of many a young airman.[20] The pilots who by good fortune found themselves under the leadership of a forward-thinking commander unafraid to overturn old methods were blessed. Spurdle was one such pilot who entered the fray as part of Sailor Malan’s 74 Squadron at Biggin Hill. The prickly but accomplished South African was one of the first to abandon the parade-ground ‘vics’ drummed into pilots for the German-inspired ‘finger four’ formation. Likewise the stilted and impractical Fighting Area Attacks were discarded by seasoned commanders in favour of looser and more intuitive methods. For all Lawrence’s flying prowess, he realised that much of his own success was due to the leadership provided by fellow-Anzac Pat Hughes, who for ‘his prowess as a pilot and a marksman and his devout squadron spirit ... he must be classed with the other great names who flew in Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain.’[21] Airmen who did well often did so under the leadership of tactically innovative commanders.
Among the pilots who did get the opportunity to engage directly with the enemy, there were a select few favoured by the gods of war. In general, pilots of all stripes were seen as equals in the air and airmen took a pretty dim view of those who had a tendency to shoot a line. Top-flight pilots were usually modest about their achievements, realising that whatever skill they possessed, their accomplishments were dependent on a whole range of factors—from the dutiful maintenance of their machines by tireless ground crews, to the support they had from their fellow pilots in the swirling dogfights of September and August. Equally undeniable, though, was that a handful of the men were in a class of their own in the battle.
The seven Kiwi aces of the campaign—Carbury, Gray, Hodgson, Gibson, Smith, Deere and Wilfrid Clouston—accounted for nearly forty per cent of all New Zealand claims. The six Australian aces—Hughes, Millington, Mayers, Curchin, Cock and Hillary—accounted for close to sixty per cent of theirs. What made all these airmen so lethal was their marksmanship; a willingness to engage the enemy at a seemingly reckless close range; a desire to push their machines right up to their operational limits; and a superior sense of their three-dimensional combat environment.
Then and today, analyses of the efforts of pilots from the British Commonwealth point out that colonial airmen had an above-average ability to hit their targets. Deflection shooting and accuracy were synonymous with these pilots. Why this should be the case is hard to establish all these years after the event but, anecdotally at least, some commentators have put it down to their hunting and shooting skills acquired on the farmlands and in the bush of New Zealand and Australia.
The Anzac aces, like others in Fighter Command, were characterised by an unflinching determination to get as close to the enemy as possible before depressing the firing button. Their combat reports are replete with matter-of-fact descriptions of unleashing a hail of lead from eight Brownings as they closed to within thirty yards of a Luftwaffe machine. Many pilots closed with the enemy, but these airmen finished their assault almost on top of their prey.
The ability to hit the target at close range and avoid machine-gun and cannon fire themselves in tightly contested aerial battles was finally determined by their flying abilities and bond to their machines. These exceptional airmen ‘flew by the seat of their pants’. In the decades after the Battle, Gard’ner confessed that he never felt a close affinity with his machine, but he noted other pilots, such as Gray, seemed to feel that ‘their aircraft becomes part of them’.[22]
Finally, situational awareness enabled the best pilots to avoid being killed while they amassed a large number of successes. In a swirling mass of machines the aces generally knew not only how to hit a target but also how to avoid becoming a target.[23] Pilots like Carbury and Hughes fell into this category, and the latter was only killed by a freakish collision. Although overall the Anzacs made up only approximately five per cent of Fighter Command, they supplied nearly a third of the top ten aces. Between them, this trans-Tasman trio of Hughes, Carbury and Gray accounted for close to fifty enemy machines over four months.
If the Anzacs had a high claim rate in proportion to their numbers in Fighter Command, the Australians also suffered from a high loss rate relative to their colleagues. They had only three losses over the months of July and October, but sandwiched between were two months of heavy casualties. Over a particularly nasty six-day period in August the Australians lost six pilots—four killed, one wounded and one captured—though they also destroyed an impressive seventeen German aircraft.[24] In total thirteen, or thirty-five per cent, of the Australians were killed. This was one of the highest loss rates of any nationality in the battle. Comparatively speaking, their New Zealand cousins fared better. The twenty Kiwi losses were spread evenly over the four months. The most notable spike in New Zealand casualties occurred during the 19 July ‘slaughter of the innocents’ when two Defiant Kiwi pilots were killed and one injured while ditching in the Channel. In all, thirteen per cent of the New Zealanders were lost, which was slightly lower than Fighter Command’s overall loss rate of eighteen per cent.[25]
On the Australian side all losses occurred during operations. This once again reflects the fact that most of these airmen were stationed in close proximity to the German incursions. The Kiwis, who were more widely dispersed across the British Isles, had a full quarter of all losses attributable to accidents. John Bickerdike was the first New Zealander killed in this manner doing aerobatic manoeuvres in a mid-July training flight, while Stanley and Holder died within hours of each during a night-flying exercise in late October.
Anzac pilots became numb and resigned to the mounting losses among their ranks. Some reacted with bitterness, but as time drew on and weariness mounted, pilots became resigned to the empty places in the mess. The airmen feigned disinterest and sought distractions from mournful thoughts at the local pubs or on jaunts into the hot spots of London. Fighting hard in the air often meant playing hard on the ground. Alcohol was a constant factor in many a ‘knees-up’. Young airmen lubricated their nights on the town with beer or spirits as they let off steam and tried to forget the terrors of the fight. The patrons of English country ale houses welcomed Churchill’s airmen with open arms.
Women flocked to the blue-uniformed fighter boys. Some liaisons were brief, forgotten as soon as the sun rose the next day, but other airmen cultivated relationships that could last a lifetime. Wartime marriages were not without their trials and perils, however, and Olive spent little more than two weeks with his wife over the entire course of the Battle of Britain, while one of his best friends died mid-battle leaving a grieving wife and two inconsolable daughters. As Clifford Emeny escorted a sobbing, grief-stricken widow to a relative’s home, he forswore a wartime marriage. The heartbroken young woman had lost her husband within two hours of their marriage.
Not all accidents and fire proved fatal. Good fortune played a part in the fate of some airmen. On one eventful morning Olive stared down an exploding oxygen tank, a disintegrating parachute, high-voltage lines, shotgun wielding farmers and a wayward fire-engine—any of which might have spelt his demise but did not. Deere gained a mythical status in this regard and must be considered one of the luckiest pilots of the campaign. His Nine Lives autobiography is aptly titled, with a catalogue of close calls that beggar belief, including a head-on collision with an Me 109, skidding along the Hornchurch runway in an inverted Spitfire during a bombing raid, and an extremely low-level bale-out cushioned by a plum-tree landing.
Pilots of the Great War had not been issued with parachutes. Fortunately for their Second World War counterparts, parachutes were standard equipment along with their yellow life-jackets. New Zealand’s Gibson was not only a Caterpillar Club member four times over but also his survival in the waters of the Channel on two occasions was testament to the life-preserving powers of the Mae West. While some men were dried off after a Channel dip or dusted off by a local farmer and then speedily returned to the battle—sometimes within hours of being shot down—other Anzacs spent months recuperating from ghastly injuries.
Fire was the airmen’s most feared foe. A spark united with pure oxygen could transform the life-giving breathing apparatus into a hellish flesh-consuming blast-furnace. Richard Hillary was grotesquely disfigured by a conflagration in the confines of his Spitfire. As he lay in the tendrils of his parachute in the Channel, the burnt and dispirited Australian attempted to take his own life. Fire had stripped his hands to the bone in places, and his eyelids, ears and forehead had been removed. New Zealander John Fleming learnt first-hand about the dangers pilots faced in their fire-prone Hurricanes. The gravity fuel tank directly abutting the instrument panel spewed burning liquid over his legs. The two men’s sole consolation was they both came under the care of their fellow Anzac, the legendary Archibald McIndoe.
The Dunedin-born plastic surgeon revolutionised the treatment of severe burns. The saline bath and grafting techniques perfected for his ‘guinea pigs’ were soon adopted worldwide. Hillary and Fleming were not only reconstructed but gained a measure of dignity thanks to the New Zealander’s methods of rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Employing handpicked staff and co-opting local townspeople into his plans meant the ‘Boss’ was able to create an environment that side-stepped medical conventions of the times, but ultimately eased the airmen back into a life beyond their injuries.
The Battle of Britain was not the end of the war for most Anzacs. The New Zealanders and Australians were cast to the winds—sitting behind desks; instructing new trainees; or once again donning their flying suits for operations over Europe, the Mediterranean, or the Asia-Pacific theatre. With time, many were promoted and not a few eventually found themselves commanding their own squadrons by the war’s end. A handful of the Battle of Britain veterans joined ‘Bush’ Parker in captivity, but greater numbers were wounded or killed in the intervening years.
Some losses were operational but a significant number were due to misfortune or accident. Hurricane ace Hodgson accumulated seven kills during a series of Battle of Britain dogfights only to meet his demise as a passenger on a routine ferry flight. The badly disfigured Richard Hillary pestered his superiors to return to the air. Diminished eyesight and poor hand dexterity—he used a knife and fork with great difficulty—were noted by follow airmen but they were unable to prevent him resuming flying duties. He died along with his radio operator-observer in a night-flying training flight in early 1943. Others died in combat, including the very last Anzac Battle of Britain veteran to lose his life in the Second World War—Ronald Bary. Based in Italy, the Kiwi pilot was killed only 28 days short of the end of the war in Europe in an army support dive-bombing attack on bridges and rail lines.[26] In all, a further forty-one New Zealanders and seven Australians died before the Second World War ended. Of the 171 Anzacs who took part in the Battle of Britain, only about half were still alive when Japan surrendered.[27]
In the post-war years most of the Anzacs put away their wings and returned to ‘civvy street’ and pre-war occupations. Others turned their wartime flying skills to good effect in commercial aviation, while some remained within the RAF, including Gard’ner. His hasty removal from the campaign after the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ was followed by recuperation, a couple of night-flying tours, contacts with enemy machines and promotions. He covered the Normandy landings from his de Havilland Mosquito and eventually secured a permanent RAF commission. He returned to his southern homeland in 1965, nearly three decades after departing New Zealand.
Unfortunately, I never got to follow up on my first interview with retired Group Captain John Gard’ner because he died in May 2011. The wide-eyed ten-year-old boy who had been captivated by flying at his first brush with an aircraft on Dunedin’s mudflats in 1928 went on to become one of the ‘little gods’ of the air over the skies of England in the summer of 1940. He was one of Churchill’s Anzac ‘Few’.