CHAPTER 3
As Fighter Command licked its wounds and New Zealand and Australian airmen recovered after the final frenetic air battles of June 1940, an ecstatic Führer mulled over his next course of action. Hitler’s racial, ideological and economic aims drew him eastward to the steppes of the great Russian plains. However, he was mindful of leaving his back open to assault. The threat of a two-front war was not to be ignored, even by this most unconventional of German military leaders. The British rejection of clandestine and public offers of a negotiated agreement pushed the Führer towards force of arms, and in July he ordered that plans for the invasion of England be drawn up under the codename Operation Sea Lion.[1] Because of the strength of the Royal Navy, it was clear that an attack, if it was to have any hope of success, would require the prior degradation of the RAF ‘to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any opposition to a German crossing’ of the English Channel.[2] The Luftwaffe’s leadership planned to strike British airfields, aircraft factories and auxiliary facilities in south-east England and thereby eventually wear the RAF down until aerial superiority had been attained. Privately, Luftwaffe leaders went as far as hoping that the destruction of the RAF as a fighting force would create a situation where Whitehall was compelled to sue for peace without a single German soldier putting his foot on English soil.
Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, had two main air fleets at his disposal in the West: Luftflotte 2, commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and Luftflotte 3 under the hand of Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle. Formerly an artilleryman in the Kaiser’s army, Kesselring was given a Luftwaffe appointment in Hitler’s Germany and took up flying at the age of forty-eight. Known to his contemporaries as ‘smiling Albert’, he appeared charming and relaxed, but his benign exterior concealed a decisive and surefooted leader who was popular with his men. Sperrle on the other hand was as menacing as Kesselring was affable. Hitler considered Sperrle to be one of his most ‘brutal-looking generals’.[3] His love of food and extravagance led Albert Speer to comment that, ‘The Field Marshal’s craving for luxury and public display ran a close second to that of his superior, Göring.’[4] Sperrle’s Great War experience as an observer was followed by his command of the secret German air training school in Russia in the 1920s. His subsequent command of the Condor Legion in Spain meant he possessed more operational air power experience than any German officer of commensurate rank. This offset his difficult manner and pompous inclinations.
As a prelude to the main aerial assault and anticipated invasion, the Luftwaffe undertook attacks on British Channel shipping, dubbed the Kanalkampf (Channel Battle) by the Germans. It was hoped that the raids would draw out defending fighters. At best, it was believed that it could sufficiently wear down the RAF in preparation for Sea Lion and, at worst, it would close the Channel to Allied shipping. Either way, it was assumed that the Luftwaffe would get a favourable outcome, especially as Kesselring and Sperrle possessed an impressive armada of aircraft, including 656 Me 109 and 168 Me 110 fighters. These were to support 769 twin-engine bombers and 316 single-engine dive-bombers.[5] The latter was the infamous gull-winged Stuka, the Junkers Ju 87. Although it had a formidable reputation as a terrifyingly precise dive-bomber, this had largely been gained in the absence of fighter opposition in Poland and France. Its lack of speed and vulnerability in a dive would be its undoing over Britain. The twin-engine aircraft ranged from medium bombers—the Junkers Ju 88 and Heinkel He 111—to light bombers—the slender Dornier Do 17 and Do 215 ‘flying pencils’. Aside from their relatively modest payloads, all four suffered from inadequate defensive armament and were dependent on the fighters for protection. Nevertheless, backed by massed Me 109s, their sheer numbers meant they had the capacity to rock Fighter Command on its heels.
Fortunately for the RAF, only a small portion of these resources were utilised in the Kanalkampf, due in part to Göring’s overconfidence, but more importantly the need to hold in reserve the bulk of the aircraft for the assault on Britain proper. In the initial throw of the dice against the convoys, Kesselring and Sperrle put into action a mere seventy-five twin-engine bombers and just over sixty dive-bombers, though supplementary units could be called upon as required. Two hundred fighters were allocated to defend these.
In Britain, Dowding was currently limited to 504 serviceable Hurricanes and Spitfires. Making matters worse, these machines were spread across Fighter Command’s four regionally based Groups—13 Group: North England and Scotland; 12 Group: Central England; 10 Group: South West England and South Wales; and 11 Group: South East England. Situated directly opposite the German air fleets and guarding the capital, 11 Group was the first line of Britain’s aerial defence but, of course, had only a portion of the entire single-engine fighter inventory. This was overseen by the most influential Anzac commander of the Second World War, the New Zealander Air Vice Marshal Keith Park.
Park cut his aviation teeth in the Great War, flying two-seater Bristol biplanes over the Western Front, where the New Zealander was credited with eleven victories and damage to some thirteen others by war’s end. In 1918, during a nine-month stint as commander of 48 Squadron in France, the Thames-born Park discovered and developed the leadership qualities that stood him in good stead two decades later in the unfolding Battle of Britain. At Bertangles, just north of Amiens, the newly promoted Major Park had under his command 18 aircraft, the 200 officers and ground crew required to keep them in the air and a collection of lorries and sundry motorised vehicles upon which the functioning of the base depended. In addition, the twenty-eight-year-old oversaw the safety and operational duties of personnel attached to the base, including medical staff, construction crews, intelligence officers and the cadre of soldiers who provided for the base’s security.[6]
It was among these men that Park demonstrated his considerable organisational abilities and a preference for frontline leadership. Eschewing deskbound command, the New Zealander headed as many patrols as possible himself. He would continue this approach in 1940, frequently flying his personalised Hurricane to 11 Group bases to get an accurate appraisal of the fighting. The tall, lean New Zealander made a habit of sitting in on officers’ meals to gauge the course of the battle and glean information about the struggle as it evolved. Park was also only too fully aware that cooks, aviation-engineers and armourers were as essential as pilots to maintaining a unit’s operational readiness.[7] In 1918, he was reported to have got rid of a handful of pilots who were either too conceited or simply too lazy to listen and learn from their ground crew’s considerable advice on getting the best out of their machines. During the Battle of Britain he promised to be no less holistic in his approach to 11 Group’s support servicemen and women, and was equally as efficient in weeding out problem personnel ill-suited to their tasks.[8]
In addition, Park was a great believer in knowing his enemy. Even as a humble Great War squadron leader, he assiduously observed the strategy and tactics of opponents over the Western Front. Often in the summer of 1918, flying alone above the lattice of muddy trenches, he critiqued the contest between Allied and Central Power pilots. He was honest enough to recognise superior German tactics and attempted to rectify this with his own men. The great struggle that he now faced against Kesselring and Sperrle would call upon all his native aviation intuition and considerable strategic intellect. Finally, he knew what it was like to have his back against the wall and not lose his nerve. A bomber attack on Park’s base in 1918 was a particularly hard blow to 48 Squadron, incapacitating fifteen pilots and observers, and writing off nine fighters. With the injection of seventeen new air crew in the weeks that followed, he found himself facing a sea of unfamiliar faces and set about re-establishing esprit de corps and operational proficiency. In 1940, at forty-eight years of age and after a series of postings, he was promoted to Air Vice Marshal and handed the most important command of his career; 11 Group’s morale and fighting capacity now rested in Park’s hands. He was able to muster some 200 Hurricanes and Spitfires in 11 Group.
Given Fighter Command’s vulnerability in machines and pilots, Park was reluctant to deploy all his forces in the protection of Channel shipping when he judged the main event still lay some days, if not weeks, in the future. His biggest problem was that radar, which was to prove so effective later in the campaign, was less useful in this type of engagement. German bombers assembled in great numbers outside the range of detection, so that by the time the enemy raiders were picked up and their intentions plotted, there was very little time left to scramble Fighter Command machines and direct them to Channel and Straits of Dover targets. In order to make meaningful contact with the enemy, Park’s only alternative was to establish standing patrols over the area—an impossible mission to fulfil given the number of convoys.[9] In the month-long Kanalkampf, Park’s airmen would be outnumbered and outmanoeuvred.
On 10 July, two large German formations arrived off Margate and Dover. The larger of these included twenty-four bombers with an escorting force of some forty single-and twin-engine Messerschmitts. Scrambled to meet the attack were five squadrons, including Donald Cobden of 74 Squadron, based at Rochford, Essex. In common with a number of South Pacific colonials, Cobden was a fine rugby player—the capstone of his career was donning the All Black jersey in August 1937 to represent New Zealand in a test against South Africa’s Springboks. Flying a Spitfire as part of 74 Squadron, he saw considerable action over France in May, securing some probables and at least one confirmed Me 109.[10]
The intruders were spotted at 1.30p.m. and all fighters were soon engaged in a vicious dogfight. The New Zealander was one of the few pilots to penetrate the Me 109 perimeter and strike the bombers, diving on a Dornier and firing his machine-guns in a short but effective burst. The result was a stream of black smoke spiralling from the starboard engine of the Luftwaffe machine. In moments, he himself came under assault from a handful of the enemy fighters. Desperate evasive manoeuvres failed to prevent cannon and machine-gun fire damaging his faltering Spitfire. He managed to shake off his assailants and limp back to a coastal airfield for a wheels-up landing. Seven Luftwaffe machines had been destroyed for the loss of one RAF pilot and a single 400-ton merchant vessel.
Cobden’s success followed the first shooting down of a German machine much earlier in the day by the curly-haired Robert Yule of Invercargill. The lone reconnaissance machine had been dispatched by the Anzac and two others in the Hurricane-equipped 145 Squadron at 5.30a.m.[11] Yule seems to have incurred no damage himself but Cobden, some hours later, probably counted himself extremely lucky to have made landfall. Both Allied and Axis pilots feared ending up ‘in the drink’.
Fighting over the waters of the Channel greatly diminished the prospect of survival. Eighty per cent of pilot losses during the month-long skirmishes occurred at sea.[12] Dowding had not anticipated the extensive use of his fighters over the Channel and consequently the RAF was ill-equipped to rescue its pilots. The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, had an excellent air-sea rescue service—the Seenotdienst—furnished with the robust Heinkel He 59 float-planes in white livery and painted with bold Red Cross markings. To enable the Seenotdienst to spot downed airmen, all German pilots were furnished with fluorescein sachets that, when broken open by a pilot, turned the surrounding waters into a bright green carpet. Lockers inside the He 59s contained first-aid equipment, heated sleeping bags and artificial respiration equipment. For the Allied pilots of the RAF, the Luftwaffe’s air-sea rescue service was to be envied but also viewed with some suspicion as it was felt in some quarters that the machines bearing the Red Cross were also being exploited for reconnaissance duties, particularly when escorted by fighters. Just the day before, Deere found himself confronted by a He 59. The following combat highlighted such fears and was the first of many close calls he endured during the Battle of Britain.
While leading a Spitfire formation out of Hornchurch in his aircraft nicknamed ‘Kiwi 2’—‘Kiwi 1’ had been lost over Dunkirk—Deere spotted a German Red Cross float-plane skimming foam-tipped waves under the protective escort of a dozen Me 109s. Deere’s section attacked the fighters, leaving the float-plane to others. Firing the new explosive De Wilde ammunition, he soon saw ‘small dancing yellow flames’ running along the fuselage of an Me 109, helping Deere gauge his effectiveness. His next target was less obliging.
The controls were ripped from Deere’s startled hands as his seat harness cut deeply into his shoulders at the sudden impact and loss of air speed in the glancing collision. Smoke and flames bellowed from the Merlin engine and the propeller blades bent back like a claw. The Me 109 had viciously ground itself along the top of the Spitfire at high speed and in the process damaged the canopy, trapping the New Zealander inside the increasingly inhospitable cockpit. He had no alternative but to glide towards the distant British coastline. Amazingly he made it and put the wrecked machine down in a paddock near Manston airfield. Deere used his bare hands to smash his way out of the machine as the carcass of ‘Kiwi 2’ went up in flames. Sitting well back from the conflagration, he catalogued his injuries: cut and bleeding hands, singed eyebrows, badly bruised knees and a cut lip. ‘But I was alive!’ A local farmer’s wife offered him a cup of tea, to which he replied he would ‘prefer something stronger’.
A whisky later and he was transported to Hornchurch where two matters of interest were being discussed: Deere’s ‘brush’ with a German, and the He 59 air-sea rescue aircraft’s true purpose. Rumour had it that, having exhausted his ammunition Deere had intentionally ploughed into the German fighter. ‘I may be a mad New Zealander...,’ remarked a bemused Deere, ‘but not so mad that I would deliberately ram an enemy aircraft head-on.’[14]
Other pilots had also come across the sea-rescue aircraft and were uncertain how they should be treated, particularly as they bore civilian registration letters and Red Cross markings, and appeared to be unarmed. What made the RAF pilots suspicious was the heavy escort some He 59s were receiving from Me 109s. After some sea-rescue machines had been shot down, the Air Ministry directed that aircraft marked with the Red Cross engaged in legitimate evacuation of the sick and wounded would be respected, but those that were flying over areas in which British operations were being undertaken would be accorded no such ‘immunity’. The Germans, however, took no chances and subsequently armed and camouflaged their aircraft as they continued to save downed Luftwaffe and, on occasion, Allied airmen during the battle.
On the Allied side, a dedicated British air-sea rescue service would not be formed until 1941. In the meantime, Park set about organising the transfer of suitable aircraft from the Army to work with coastal rescue launches to pick up downed airmen as a stopgap measure.
In addition to the Kiwis, a trio of Australian-born pilots saw action on 11 July: John Curchin, Richard Glyde and Flight Lieutenant Stuart Walch. A morning attack on a convoy drew out Curchin’s 609 Squadron. At the outbreak of the campaign the Melburnian was still relatively inexperienced when his unit was jumped by twenty Me 109s. He barely managed to scrape through his first air battle and a number of squadron members were less fortunate. By midday, 87 Squadron had joined the fray with Glyde as Blue 2.
Glyde, unlike Curchin, was already an accomplished fighter pilot with four victories to his name in France and a DFC pinned to his chest. Originally from Perth, Western Australia, he was denied admittance to the RAAF on medical grounds, forcing him to pay his own fare to Britain, where he obtained direct entry to the RAF. On this day, his first major engagement, he attacked three Me 110s near Portland. The first sustained damage to both engines. His next target was less easily dispatched, with the rear gunner shooting a large hole in Glyde’s canopy and placing three bullets in his starboard wing-tip. Finally, he leapt to aid a fellow Hurricane pilot having trouble with another Me 110. Although the tail gunner’s aim was for the most part wayward, he did manage to drill a bullet through the control panel, striking the armour plating near Glyde’s head. Shaken but undeterred, the Anzac reeled in the fleeing intruder forcing the Luftwaffe airman to put his aircraft down in the water, where it sank moments later.[15] Meanwhile, Walch of 238 Squadron engaged a Me 110, also near Portland.[16] A native of Hobart, Tasmania, Walch fired three-second bursts as he closed to within fifty yards. He saw it plunge into the sea, with black smoke trailing from an engine. The Anzac had chalked up the squadron’s first confirmed victory.[17] This was tempered by the loss of two Anzacs in short order.
Twenty-four hours later the Kiwis suffered their first loss when Aucklander Henry Allen, piloting a Hurricane out of North Weald, Essex, was hit. Charged with protecting convoys plying the Thames Estuary, 151 Squadron was ordered to cover a small armada codenamed ‘Booty’. Soon after, word was received of incoming enemy machines. At 9.00a.m. in broken cloud cover the squadron fell amongst the bombers.[18] The part-Maori twenty-six-year-old, with a cabinet full of sporting trophies and medals from his college days in New Zealand and three years as an officer for the Blue Funnel Line steamship company under his belt, was about to engage the enemy for his first and last time.[19] Met by labyrinthine crossfire, the Hurricane’s engine was knocked out of action, blades frozen in blunt testimony to the damage. Squadron pilots saw his machine glide seaward. The waters off Essex claimed aircraft and pilot.
The very next day, 13 July, an Australian was lost. RAAF Point Cook graduate Flight Lieutenant John Kennedy was covering Convoy ‘Bread’ on its way to Portland. His fellow Australian in 238 Squadron, Walch, was close at hand when Kennedy spotted a lone Do 17. The Sydneysider ordered his section to intercept the bomber, only to be bounced by three Messerschmitts. Kennedy was hit and attempted to crash-land on the beach, but the machine stalled and he was killed. The first New Zealander and the first Australian to die in the battle had done so within a day of each other.
Over the next ten days the Luftwaffe employed the same tactics as weather permitted. Bombers and fighters would accumulate over the French coast and then in strength swing west in pursuit of a convoy. This pattern was repeated two to three times a day. With the advantage of surprise and numbers, the strategy was generally successful and culminated on 19 July with extremely heavy losses to Fighter Command—the greater part of which were suffered by Defiant-equipped squadrons.
Not all Anzacs were fortunate enough to find themselves at the controls of either a Hurricane or Spitfire. Alongside the development of these machines had been that of a third: the Boulton Paul Defiant ‘turret-fighter’. The Defiant was a curious beast, conceived as bomber-destroyer. The placement of a turret directly behind the pilot was its main point of departure from its more illustrious siblings. Utilising four turret-mounted Browning machineguns, it should have made for a fearsome combatant in the air war.
Wellington-born air-gunner Clifford Emeny was inserted into a Defiant and readily appreciated the potential when in training he was required to fire at a drogue. His pilot pulled the Defiant to within fifty feet and the young New Zealander opened fire at a rate of 2800 rounds per minute, shredding the drogue. His instructor offered fulsome praise: ‘There is nothing of the target left to count the hits. You have destroyed the target. Absolutely bloody perfect.’
Pushed along by the same Merlin power-plant as the Hurricane and Spitfire, the first Defiant prototype was test-flown in July 1937. Churchill was a keen sponsor and, the following year, 450 machines were ordered to outfit nine squadrons. Nevertheless, in spite of Churchill’s support, and its vague resemblance to the Hurricane, the Defiant would prove unsuited to modern aerial warfare.[20] The electro-hydraulically powered turret dominated the machine, adding an extra 1500 lbs to the Defiant’s overall weight. The result was that it barely scraped past 300 mph at top speed and its manoeuvrability, compared with that of the German single-engine fighter, was terminally sluggish. A lack of forward-firing guns only increased the turret-fighter’s vulnerability. Moreover, a mortally wounded Defiant was a death-trap for the gunner, who could extract himself from his coffin-like enclosure only with great difficulty.
Surprisingly, its unusual design meant that its first forays into the European air war were more successful than might otherwise be expected. Over the beaches of Dunkirk, German pilots mistook the Defiant for a standard fighter, only to find that their rear-on attack was coming under withering fire from Browning machine-guns. Luftwaffe crews were quick learners however, and soon the hunter became the hunted as enemy airmen discovered that frontal attacks and assault from below could be pressed home with impunity. Fortunately for RAF pilots, and the outcome of the conflict, only two squadrons rather than nine were equipped with Defiants by the time the Battle of Britain was under way—141 and 264 Squadrons. The intervention of Dowding, who immediately appreciated the limitations of a turret-fighter in terms of performance and ‘hitting power’, strangled its development and production in favour of the Hurricane and Spitfire.[21] In total, nineteen New Zealanders and two Australians were deployed in Defiants as pilots or gunners.
In what became known as the ‘slaughter of the innocents’, 141 Squadron’s two-seater Defiants were scrambled against a formation of Me 110s harassing shipping. Of the nine aircraft, a third were piloted by Kiwis: John Kemp, Rudal Kidson and Gard’ner. None had any combat experience—this would be their collective baptism of fire. Only that morning they had been ordered forward to Hawkinge airfield, Kent. Just after midday they were sent on a patrolling mission 20 miles below Folkestone. The turret-fighters lumbered slowly to gain altitude, but only fifteen minutes into their flight they were jumped by a large number of Me 109s. Among those rolling out of the sun on top of the Defiants was ace Hauptmann Hannes Trautloft, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the attack on Poland and the invasion of France.
The eagle-eyed Luftwaffe airman spotted 141 Squadron flying in V-formation. He almost immediately discerned the Defiants’ defining mid-dorsal turret and decided to take advantage of their complete lack of forward armament. The Fighter Command pilots and gunners never had a chance. Trautloft observed fragments of fuselage torn away as his cannon fire raked the flank of a Defiant. The machine exploded in a fiery inferno.[22] The inexperienced RAF pilots had not been briefed on the best defensive tactic to give them a chance of survival. Consequently, instead of circling the wagons, the Defiants persisted in flying on a straight and level course. The Me 109s dived on the hapless turret-fighters and used their momentum to sweep quickly around for further attacks. The arrival of a Hurricane unit prevented the destruction of every Defiant. Nevertheless, the results were devastating, and it is likely that Kemp and Kidson and their gunners were killed early in the action. Only three of the nine Defiants were to make it home, and one of these had to be written off. Of the crews, four pilots and six gunners were lost.
The sole New Zealander to survive the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ was Gard’ner. He recalled years later how the Germans had gained the upper hand, bouncing them out of the sun. His gunner was most likely killed in the initial ‘thud, thud, thud’ of cannon fire. ‘I could see a small naval vessel,’ and he tried to get close to it but overshot by a wide margin. In the moments before hitting the sea he made the mistake of sliding back the cockpit hood and unstrapping his harness in order to make a quick exit. On impact, he was knocked out as his head bounced against the front and rear of the cockpit. He came to ‘in the water and struggling to get myself out of the aeroplane’. Blood from a deep cut across his forehead blinded the Kiwi, and then ‘suddenly I heard a voice saying, “Come on, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”’[23]
Gard’ner was hauled aboard the rescue vessel, but his gunner went down with the Defiant. The New Zealander promptly passed out, waking hours later in hospital with his head swathed in bandages. The unit had been decimated. The handful of crew and aircraft that remained were transferred to Scotland and the other Defiant unit, 264 Squadron, was immediately pulled from action. Suffering head injuries, Gard’ner was placed on sick leave for three months, only returning to the squadron, which had been transferred to night-fighter operations, in October.[24]
Action was sporadic over the following weeks, but a couple of Australians saw heavy fighting. On 20 July, Walch was leading Blue Section of 238 Squadron on a standing patrol over a convoy south-east of Portland. During the midday flight he became separated from the other Hurricanes in his section, but continued his duties until required to switch to his reserve tank and head for his home field of Tangmere. Then he spotted a formation of fifteen aircraft coming in at altitude towards the unsuspecting convoy. The Tasmanian pulled his machine around and climbed to make an attack from out of the sun. Bombs exploded around one of the escorting destroyers as he ‘pulled the plug’ of the fighter’s booster, propelling it towards three Me 109s. At barely 50 yards he laid down a two-second blanket of lead on one of the German fighters. The results were instantaneous: writhing black smoke spewed from the engine as a telltale sign of terminal injuries sustained by the 12-cylinder engine. Confirming the diagnosis, the machine fell into a vertical seaward dive. Within seconds, the two remaining Luftwaffe airmen were doing everything in their power to get astern of the young Australian. ‘I pulled up in a steep stall,’ he wrote in his after-action report, ‘and made for home.’[25]
At 6.20p.m. 65 Squadron, at its forward Manston base, was scrambled to intervene in a Luftwaffe raid on a convoy off Dover. Olive led Yellow Section. Although the enemy aircraft attacking the vessels were nowhere to be seen, he did spy an Me 109 about to attack an inattentive Hurricane in the distance. The Anzac approached the two aircraft from an almost head-on position with two other 65 Squadron pilots in tow. They were too late. The Me 109’s cannon had sheared off the entire tail section of the Hurricane. ‘In an instant,’ recalled Olive, ‘the pilot popped out of the cockpit like a cork from a champagne bottle.’[26] Either the enemy pilot had not seen the trio of Spitfires or thought he could outrun them because he then turned for France, flying in a straight line. At full throttle the Anzac overhauled the German fighter in a downhill run to Calais at close to 450 mph. ‘When his wings filled the gun sight ... I opened fire. Pieces, large and small came off him and flashed dangerously close.’ Olive gave him a full sixteen-second burst of his ammunition and the Messerschmitt with its pilot ‘knifed into the water’. It was a bitter-sweet moment. On the one hand Olive had secured his first victory, but on the other he had killed another airman. In his memoirs he recorded, that after unloading the entire magazine of the Spitfire into the German, he ‘turned away in disgust’.[27]
In fact, Olive had been deceiving himself since he had first seen flying in France. When he looked back on the considerable action he had seen over Dunkirk in the previous month, he asked himself: ‘Had I destroyed any [Me] 109s? Several of the boys of my vintage were already claiming double figures.’ His low claim rate was simply due to the fact he did not want to admit to taking someone else’s life.[28]
Unlike many pilots, Olive had pre-war experience with Germans. In late 1937, he and a South African from 65 Squadron secured leave to ski and hike in Austria. The two colonials spent most of their time with Austrian guides of similar age to themselves in the enchanting mountains of the Tyrol; friendships were struck up and conversation turned to politics and National Socialism. The guides were sympathetic to Germany’s Hitler and the prospects for Austria, and dismissed the likelihood of war. Twelve months later Olive was able to revisit Austria, but everything had changed with the German take-over: the Anschluss. His entry to Austria was marred by the Nazi customs officer, a ‘coarse-looking brute’ in jackboots who ‘spat some remark to me in German I didn’t understand’ and everywhere ‘floated the Nazi Swastika’.
His friends of only a year ago had lost their happy-go-lucky outlook on life and would only talk politics in the most guarded terms. Some were almost panicky and now considered war inevitable. ‘Hitler is going to try to conquer the world,’ one noted desperately. ‘It is too late for us. We are already conquered. The National Socialists are incredibly evil. If they conquer the world, civilisation will go back to another Dark Age.’ Olive compared this trip with his first Austrian sojourn just a year earlier and observed that the ‘people were the same, at least the ones I had mixed with were, but a brutal element had been mobilised to terrify the people into abject compliance with the slightest whim of the new ruling class’. During the Battle of Britain the thoughtful Queenslander wrestled with his moral qualms:
Richard Hillary was another pilot who rationalised his actions along ideological lines, but overlaid this with a veneer of reasoned professionalism and pragmatism. His views were similarly coloured by his pre-war contact with Germans but he was, in contrast to Olive, far less sympathetic. In 1938, at the Rhineland river town of Bad Ems as part of the Oxford rowing team, the Australian expatriate had been none too impressed with the attitude of the Germans he met at the General Göring’s Prize Fours. The Oxonians deliberately displayed a cultivated indifference to the opposition and even the race itself, much to the annoyance of the German competitors.
During the penultimate race the English were five boat-lengths adrift of the leader when someone spat on them. ‘It was a tactical error,’ recalled Hillary. His crew won the race by two-fifths of a second, much to the chagrin of the German crews as they watched the languid Brits hold aloft the trophy. Consequently, when the war came, Hillary felt little affinity for the German pilots, and the war itself offered, at least for those from the university squadrons, the opportunity to show they were a ‘match for Hitler’s dogmafed youth’.[31]
In spite of his political disdain for his National Socialist adversaries, when he finally made his first kill Hillary, like many of his contemporaries, felt he was merely doing his job as a professional fighter pilot. In his best-selling book chronicling his combat experiences, Hillary shared his thoughts in the wake of shooting down his first German:
In spite of Hillary’s clinical analysis, many other pilots who came face-to-face with their victims’ mutilated and burnt bodies in an English or French field were less enamoured of the impersonal ‘duellist’ analogy.
When, back in November 1939, Cobber Kain confronted the wreckage of his widely celebrated first victory over France, the young Kiwi was left with no doubt of the bloody nature of war, even for fighter pilots. What was left of the crew was scattered though an orchard and around a church, with two fire-scorched skulls adorned with the remnants of aviation headgear. His biographer Michael Burns wrote that the ‘euphoria in the kill evaporated when he saw the reality of war close-up ... and the illusion was gone’.[33] Newspaper reporters recalled that Kain was visibly distressed. On the back of a photograph, which he sent to a family friend, of himself standing amid the wreckage, he scrawled ‘Looking a little sobered after viewing my 1st victim...’
Few of the Anzacs would feel the same hatred for their enemy as some of the Continental pilots, especially the Poles, who had not only suffered the indignity of a German invasion but the great loss of civilian life that followed. Nevertheless, personal loss could inspire a strong desire to ‘even the score’ or deliver retribution. Farnborough-based test pilot Arthur Clouston lost his brother to the Germans and waited for the opportunity to strike back. In September, the sirens blared and a mad rush was made for the fighters. The New Zealander won the race to a Spitfire and once aloft found a cluster of bombers retreating after unloading their armaments. Clouston latched onto a Me 110, only to have a large bomber pass directly in front of him. A long burst from his eight machine guns resulted in the aircraft rolling over and disintegrating on impact with a local farmer’s field. The temporarily forgotten Me 110 soon felt the sting of Clouston’s skill and ire; the rear gunner was killed and the starboard engine suffered heavy damage. Exhilarated, he returned to base feeling much better having ‘paid the debt’ for his brother.[34]
Observing the results of the conduct of some German pilots turned a number of the RAF fight pilots quickly away from the idea that this aerial struggle was an honourable contest between gentlemen. During the fall of France, pilots of the AASF had been disgusted by the Luftwaffe’s deliberate use of Stuka dive bombers on civilians fleeing the front lines.[35] Calculated to slow the advance of Allied counter-operations, the attacks on the refugees left a trail of dead civilian men, women and children that dispelled any illusions that this air war was a replay of the chivalrous exploits of the Great War. Thereafter, they saw it as their duty to rid the world of Hitler and National Socialism, one Luftwaffe pilot at a time.
Attitudes also hardened towards the enemy when German pilots were deemed to be not playing within the rules of the game. Spurdle was one of the few pilots to be confronted by just such a situation and it came to define his attitude to war and the enemy. In a vertical dive at over 600 mph chasing an Me 109, he lost his starboard wing. He baled out at 20,000 feet and opened his parachute. He immediately found himself enmeshed in tracer fire as he was attacked by a Luftwaffe airman.
Fortunately, the handgun-wielding Spurdle did not have to go one-on-one with the Messerschmitt, as two Spitfires entered the fray.[37] The Kiwi had a grandstand view of the fight as the ‘Jerry staggered, slipped and fell, crippled and smoking into a wood’. ‘Served the bastard right!’ thought Spurdle.
After a handful of days of respite in London he returned to the mess to find pilots still fuming about the barbaric Luftwaffe pilot firing upon the defenceless New Zealander. Spurdle was having none of it and had drawn his own typically forthright conclusions from the frightening incident: ‘You’re nuts! The Hun was right! I’d do exactly the same if over their territory ... He’s only going to come up again and it could be my turn the next time.’ He stated that, ‘I’d shoot up an ambulance or their bloody women to help win the war!’[38] Few pilots, Anzac or otherwise, would have agreed, but most had not been shot at while hanging defenceless in a parachute.
Clearly, the rationale for fighting and killing the enemy differed from pilot to pilot. While some argued that their actions were part of a crusade to destroy Nazism, others rested in the role assigned them of highly skilled professionals doing their job. Either way, a pilot could not be expected to have a great deal of sympathy for an enemy who had already killed some of his best mates and was doing everything in his power to do the same to him. All pilots agreed that air fighting was a zero-sum game. Returning to the squadron mess holding a trophy collected from the remains of a wreck—a Mauser pistol—Kain was asked by reporters how he felt about the Germans he had just killed. He responded, in a slightly breaking voice, ‘Well it was either them or me.’[39]