Prologue

In a grey October sky we had scrambled once again, our second time up, but at least we had had time for something to eat. The controller was warning us of Messerschmitts in our vicinity and all eyes were straining to get sight of them. It was imperative that we saw them before they saw us.

Suddenly there they were. Fifteen grey-blue 109s came into view someway below us. Hooray, I don’t think they have seen us. This was a luxury. I should have guessed it was too good to be true. Our leader gave us the order to attack and we began to dive. Already I was making a target selection. But what we hadn’t seen were the 40 or more 109s above and behind us. Our leader didn’t generally get into this predicament and it went through my head later that he must known what he was doing but we’d been caught out. Then someone behind me spotted the danger and yelled a warning over the radio. Some of the 109s were coming down on us.

When we initially heard the ‘break, break, break!’ we did just that. You never argued when you heard this instruction, or asked questions. If you take a moment to ask what or where, you are dead. So we turned – scattered – in all directions, the adrenalin pumping. Charles English, my No.2, must have been too slow in breaking as his Hurricane was hit badly. He tried to get out but apparently, as he did so, his parachute got caught on the Hurricane’s tail-plane and he went down with his machine.

Meantime, I went curving away as fast as I could, my head turning in all directions, expecting at any moment to feel the impact of gunfire upon my aircraft, but nothing happened.

Then I pulled out, and looked around and there right ahead of me, for some unearthly reason, was a 109 peacefully going home quite happily, straight and level. After checking the sky all around me, I closed in and sat behind him, lined his silhouette in my gun-sight and shot him down. It was quite extraordinary. I don’t know what the pilot was doing. I think it must have been one of the bunch that attacked us, had taken a shot and figured he was done. Or perhaps he was one of the bomb-carriers, and having dropped his bomb, was going home for his tea. His mind could not have been on the job, he just wasn’t looking around. Inexperience, perhaps. Anyway, he thought he was going south towards home and he didn’t make it. You can never relax when you are in action. This chap had and he paid the price.