The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (38 page)

The day came when I was allowed out of the hospital for a few hours. Sue got me dressed, and with a pair of dark glasses, cotton-wool under my eyes, and my right arm in a sling, I looked fairly presentable. I walked out through the swing-doors and took a deep breath.

London in the morning was still the best place in the world. The smell of wet streets, of sawdust in the butchers’ shops, of tar melted on the blocks, was exhilarating. Peter had been right: I loved the capital. The wind on the heath might call for a time, but the facile glitter of the city was the stronger. Self-esteem, I suppose, is one cause; for in the city, work of man, one is somebody, feet on the pavement, suit on the body, anybody’s equal and nobody’s fool; but in the country, work of God, one is nothing, less than the earth, the birds, and the trees; one is discordant – a blot.

I walked slowly through Ravenscourt Park and looked into many faces. Life was good, but if I hoped to find some reflection of my feeling I was disappointed. One or two looked at me with pity, and for a moment I was angry; but when I gazed again at their faces, closed in as on some dread secret, their owners hurrying along, unseeing, unfeeling, eager to get to their jobs, unaware of the life within them, I was sorry for them. I felt a desire to stop and shake them and say: “You fools, it’s you who should be pitied and not I; for this day I am alive while you are dead.”

And yet there were some who pleased me, some in whom all youth had not died. I passed one girl, and gazing into her face became aware of her as a woman: her lips were soft, her breasts firm, her legs long and graceful. It was many a month since any woman had stirred me, and I was pleased. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. I did not speak to her for fear of breaking the spell, but walked back to lunch on air. After this I was allowed out every day, and usually managed to stay out until nine o’clock, when I drove back through the blitz and the black-out.

NIGHT FIGHTER

RODERICK CHISHOLM

In 1940 Roderick Chisholm began operations as a night fighter pilot with the RAF’s 604 Squadron.

One day at the end of October 1940 the first Beaufighter arrived at Middle Wallop. On the ground it was an ominous and rather unwieldy looking aircraft, with its outsize undercarriage and propellers and small wings, but in the air it looked just right.

There is never a new machine introduced but some people whisper that it is dangerous to fly, that its speed is disappointing and that it is, in general, a wash-out. Of such criticisms the Beaufighter had more than its fair share. The reports, however, from those few of the Squadron who first flew it were favourable. It obviously had a good take-off and it was said to be manoeuvrable and fast, doing well over 300 miles per hour at about 15,000 feet. It had tankage for five hours’ patrolling, an improved type of radar, and four cannon. Most important of all, it had a cockpit out of which the pilot could see well. First impressions were favourable; but having just become accustomed to the Blenheim, I could not help feeling a bit depressed because I knew I would have to start again from scratch.

Results and operational experience were urgently needed, and the first Beaufighter was pressed into operations immediately, the only pilots to whom it was entrusted being Mike Anderson and John Cunningham.
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Ignorant of the theoretical side of night interception and inexperienced on the practical side, I was then sceptical about its prospects. I did not believe it possible with Blenheims, quite apart from their inadequate speed and radar, and so I doubted whether Beaufighters would be any more successful. This was a doubt based only on a “hunch” of the most reactionary sort. I had already chased many aircraft and sometimes I had been told that I should be fairly near them, but I had not yet seen another aircraft in flight at night and I could not imagine a technique for interception and attack. My discouragement grew, and sometimes a fleeting and irrational doubt appeared, the fruit perhaps of a primitive instinct: seeing is believing and I was not seeing. And later it always seemed somehow incredible when, after a drawn-out and exacting chase wholly dependent on electric sight, a silhouette suddenly took shape, looming up like a lamp-post in a fog.

The news less than a month after the arrival of the first Beaufighter that John had destroyed a Junkers 88 was electrifying. For me it meant that the bombers we were sent to chase were really there and that the cover of the dark was not absolute. Had further confirmation been needed, it was supplied by Mike, who destroyed a Heinkel 111 a few nights later. There seemed something unreal about these combats. To leave a comfortable Hampshire airfield and to come upon an intruder over one’s own country in the dark, to shoot at it and watch it go down like a Catherine wheel and explode on hitting the ground, to break the spell and feel that the cover of darkness was no longer complete – these were strange and exciting adventures. While John with typical resourcefulness had enabled his observer, Phillipson, to get the contact by investigating a searchlight concentration, Mike had been guided all the way by a ground controller who, with radar, kept track both of the enemy and the Beaufighter, remotely manœuvring the latter to a position from which its own radar could see the enemy and from where Cannon, his observer, could take over. Thus radar had played a key part in both successes, and it was stimulating for some of us to think that the latter interception took place entirely in the dark and under close ground control. Perhaps there was hope yet for the less resourceful; perhaps all of us might see some action before long – such was one line of reasoning.

But contacts alone were useless. Their size and their movement had to be interpreted by the observer and a running commentary maintained to the pilot to give him a picture of what he could not see and had to imagine, and every now and again a quick instruction had to be inserted like “slow down”, “faster”, “climb a little”, “down a bit” or “steady, hold it there”. This and the flying of the aircraft made the teamwork which would bring the Beaufighter to a position from which the pilot could see with his own eyes; then it was all up to him, and the four 20-millimetre cannon he controlled. It sounded straightforward; yet I, for one, was still dubious. I doubted my ability to achieve the high standard of flying which seemed vital to this sort of blind-man’s bluff, this groping for the enemy. To fly in the dark and at the same time to search for the visual contact by a systematic concentration on the sky seemed a very far-off feat to one who had only just begun to realise that concentration on instruments need not, in some conditions, be incessant. It was plain that we all needed much training and practice; how we were to get it was less obvious.

Radar control from the ground had been on trial in our sector for some months, and many of us had had experience of it in practices, taking the part alternately of the bomber and the fighter. These early experiments were not encouraging, but they had about them an air of scientific investigation that made them interesting for us, although we knew little about the gear used, which then was “top secret” and was referred to simply as G.C.I. There was an academic ring about the instructions given by the scientist designers (who were then the controllers) to the pilot who, miles high above the sleeping land, was charging about blindfold and trusting. It seemed that the thanks proffered over the radio at the end of a practice or a patrol were appropriate to the completion of a valuable but inconclusive laboratory experiment. But inconclusive though it consistently was so far as I was concerned, G.C.I. was now no longer experimental. We had proof that G.C.I. could direct a radar fighter near enough to an enemy bomber for a contact, and we knew that the Beaufighter had the speed to overhaul it.

The problems facing the higher command must at this time have been exceedingly grave. The enemy were flying over us at night with all but immunity from interception, and our cities were being systematically destroyed. To deal with the night bomber there were plans in profusion; more anti-aircraft guns, more searchlights, more radar fighters, more cat’s-eye fighters and more special devices; but with successes so few and experience so slender, there can have been no certainty that priorities were being rightly allocated, and there must have been much relief that there was now a clear indication. A new radar fighter had succeeded in one sector with both ground control and searchlights, and informed circles were probably now optimistic. The pioneering efforts of Mike and John and their observers, and their rewards, were probably as far reaching in their effect on policy as they were laudable in their execution.

We, the aircrew, were happily unconscious of the bigger issues, and our only anxieties outside our own flying task were such seemingly vital domesticities as the establishing of the right to late breakfast, the night-flier’s extra egg, or petrol for leave. The activities of the Squadron were really all that mattered in the war, and they were all engrossing. Nevertheless, we could see the proportions of the task in
our own sector and it was enormous. It was, in fact, only a small part of that confronting Fighter Command.

Controllers, radar operators and pilots had to be trained in the use of new equipment and in new techniques. When John scored the first success there were but three pilots fit to fly the Beaufighter at night and the same number of competent operators. Method had to be worked out between pilots and their observers and pilots and ground controllers. Each separate operation had to be practised, and then dress rehearsals were needed. Yet the urgency of operations virtually ruled out practice at night because all available aircraft were required for the programme. We all needed practice, but when could we get it? Which comes first, training or operations, the chicken or the egg? This perpetual quandary, which must always beset the high commands in modern war, was very acute just then.

We were up against poor serviceability of new equipment, and ignorance. The Beaufighters had their teething troubles which, though mostly minor, could become serious in night flying. The radar was new and delicate; it broke down frequently; and the mechanics who knew much about it were few. Our radar officers never spared themselves, working, it seemed, day and night, and often flying on operations as well as in tests and practices. The observers had had only the scantiest training, a number of them having been airgunners who had been given a short conversion course. As soon as a pilot was considered fit, he and his observer became operational as a crew. Thereafter they had to practise on the Germans. I shall remember it always by a not unusual incident during a daylight test flight in a Blenheim. I flew some distance behind another aircraft and I told my observer to turn on the radar. There was an “O.K.”, a silence and suddenly, a little later, an excited cry “I can see it!”, and then, after a few moments of suspense, “It’s gone!”, and further silence. And that was more than usually occurred, since on most occasions there was nothing to be seen on the radar tubes at all.

By the end of 1940 we had been completely re-equipped, and sufficient pilots, six in all, had been scraped together to allow the operational programme to proceed exclusively with Beaufighters. The Blenheim had disappeared from night fighting so far as we were concerned, and those like myself who had not had the opportunity of flying a Beaufighter at night became non-operational. With impatience we waited for an opportunity for Beaufighter night solos, the essential prelude to becoming operational again; we were short of aircraft and at this season the weather was often bad, and so it was that Mike, John, Georgie, Spekie, Alastair and Jackson were on operations every night for about a month.

After weeks of depressing inactivity, I was given a chance. With low, broken cloud and a forecast of deterioration, the weather was not ideal, but I was no longer a novice and, needing time only for one or two take-offs, circuits and landings, I was let go. What followed was not all my fault, nor can it be attributed wholly to the weather, for soon after I had taken off the control went off the air and all calls were ignored, with the result that I and the three others also airborne assumed the radio, either ground or air, to have failed. There was dangerous confusion. In that weather the decision to land while we knew we were near base was inevitable. It was every man for himself and, with the cloud at about 1,000 feet, we came in and landed as we could. I broke cloud, saw the aerodrome lights and, making an ill-judged and hurried approach, came straight in. I was too high and, to make matters worse, I held off too early and opened up a little to reduce the bump. The aircraft touched down and ran on with all the momentum of ten tons moving at eighty miles per hour. I braked hard, but we were on wet grass – there were no runways then and the flare-path, laid out into the wind, was sometimes too short to cover faults – and the boundary lights of the Andover-Salisbury road seemed to be approaching alarmingly. A moment later I was in the road and at rest at last. Suddenly everything was still. I got out and walked away from what had been a perfectly good Beaufighter, feeling rather an ass.

A few nights later I tried again and, all going well, we were reinstated on the operational programme, so that one of the original six crews could then have one night off in six.

With experience my confidence grew. I felt I was becoming accustomed to the Beaufighter and its idiosyncrasies. It was then unstable fore and aft, and so was not ideal for night flying. It always seemed – and this was in the imagination of an anxious mind – that the darker the night the worse was the effect of this instability. If there were sufficient external guides, lights in good visibility, a skyline or moonlit ground, it was easy enough to fly steadily, as in daylight; but if those aids were absent, the night dark and visibility poor, the instruments were the only guides, and instrument flying in the early Beaufighter called for unceasing and most exacting concentration. There were times when the loss or gain of a few hundred feet in the gentle undulation of its normal trajectory could not be afforded, and at such times there had to be no relaxing.