War Stories III (5 page)

Bigham Hill, South of London, England
29 August 1940

I joined the Air Force after we were given the talk by a First World War fighter ace, who said, “There's going to be another war and you chaps are going to be in it. I'll give you one piece of advice. When you get into your
first combat you'll be frightened. Always remember the chap in the other cockpit is twice as frightened as you are.”

He was right. When I got into my first combat, I was practically hysterical but I thought of those words, and then said, “Well then, the poor chap in the German cockpit must be going insane, so I'd better put him out of his misery.” Which I did.

I applied to join the Royal Air Force as soon as I was seventeen and then in January 1936, they sent me a letter saying to report. I was lucky because I had already done 100 to 150 hours flying at a training school. The RAF gave me a couple of checks, put me through some drills, a little ground school, and then my instructor said, “Fine, you know how to fly, you've done it.” So I was selected to fly fighters and assigned to a Hurricane squadron.

Nobody had imagined that the Germans would roll up to the coast of France so fast. We reckoned the only aircraft we were going to see were bombers. But my first fight was against Messerschmidt 109s. And as they were coming toward us I thought they were specks on the windscreen—when suddenly they grew larger, coming right at us. I vividly remember the first one I shot down. He came out of a cloud about thirty feet above me—so close that I could see oil streaks from underneath his engine cowlings and missing chips of paint. He swept over the top of me and he was turning around, coming in to attack. As he did, he overshot, so I got on his tail and shot him down.

Within a couple of weeks the British Expeditionary Force in France was surrounded at Dunkirk and they pulled my squadron back to Bigham Hill. From there, I flew cover over Dunkirk, trying to protect the troops being evacuated and providing cover for them from attacks by German bombers and fighter aircraft. We were amazed that so many troops were able to get out and across the Channel. France capitulated shortly after that. We said, “It's up to us now... and nobody is going to muck us about anymore.”

After Dunkirk there was a lull while the Germans got ready to launch their heavy strikes on England. And then the raids started in what
the newspaper people called the Battle of Britain, and it began to get very hectic.

At first they went after the ports and beach defenses and the like. Then, after a few weeks, the Germans started to mount heavy raids on our airfields with 200 to 250 bombers—escorted by a similar number of fighters flying above them. We'd take a look and say, “Well . . . where do we start?” Our tactics had us going this way and that, and it wasn't very successful. After we had lost a number of our mates, someone said, “I tell you what—let's take the Germans head on. They probably won't like that—the gunner in a bomber is sitting in a Plexiglas nose—and we've got eight guns and he's only got two. So let's take them head on. That should split them up.” And it did.

The Germans' instinct was to pull up, over the top of someone that they thought was about to collide with them. And that's a bad instinct. We learned to always push forward and fly underneath for two reasons: one, you expect the other chap to pull up, and two, you gain more speed shoving the nose down into a quick dive. It gives you time to turn around and attack from the rear.

That kind of thing helped. And you got to know your aircraft inside out—all it could and couldn't do.

On a typical day we'd be up and on the airfield before first light—aircraft ready, engines warmed up and ready to go. Because we had radars to warn us of an incoming raid in our sector, we were usually on fifteen-minute alert. But in late August and early September—when they were hitting our bases—sometimes several times a day we would be on “cockpit alert”—sitting in the cockpit, guns loaded, engine running, just waiting for the signal to launch, what direction to head and what altitude they were coming in on. Those were very long days—and very short nights.

Had we lost, and been invaded, Germany would've controlled the whole of Europe. There would have been no stepping-stone for the U.S. to come to our help. That was something we thought about a lot in those days.

London, England
31 August 1940

I took my first flight in a bi-plane at a circus when I was fourteen and became a pilot in 1936. I used to read a magazine called
Flight,
and there was an advertisement saying that the Royal Air Force wanted pilots. And I told them that I wanted to join a fighter squadron

The first time I saw a Hurricane was about 1938. We'd already been briefed by the British air attaché in Berlin, about the capabilities of the Messerschmitt 109. And the Hurricane was an airplane that had been produced to compete against the 109 with its eight guns, a proven engine, and it looked like a proper airplane. At the same time we saw the Spitfire. It had been produced at about the same time. We were certain that with
these two aircraft we could take on anything that the Germans wanted to throw at us.

In those days there were no two-seat trainers. A test pilot would sit us down and tell us about the airplane, so we weren't completely in the dark. But we had to teach ourselves how to fly it.

After the Germans invaded Poland we flew to France and were posted to a French air base and settled down to wait for the Germans. We were at this place for about nine months, until May, when the Germans invaded France.

While we were in France we had no radar, like we had back in England—so we had no advance warning of any movement of the German air force. The only indications we had was when we saw these condensation contrails in the sky. But of course we had no communications so we didn't know if they were ours, French, or even German airplanes. So we had to intercept them to find out. The first time I saw a German airplane was when I intercepted one of these condensation contrails—and it turned out to be an RAF aircraft doing photographic reconnaissance. I was following him when I looked down and saw a German Me-109, coming up to intercept this recon airplane. So I paid a compliment for this German's interest by taking a shot at him.

He saw me first, dived away, and I followed him. It took me about ten minutes before I got closer to him—but I still couldn't get within range to fire. He dove again, trying to lure me into some high-tension cables but I saw them in time. He pulled up to see if I hit them and crashed, but as he pulled up—which slowed him up—it gave me an opportunity to get within range and I shot him down.

On the second day of the German invasion, my own personal airplane—which I'd had for about three years—was being serviced, so I got into another plane. When I got to 18,000 feet I realized the oxygen wasn't working. So I called the flight leader and said, “I have to return to base—my oxygen is not working.”

The pilot flying the point said, “Okay . . . push off. We'll see you later.”

As I was flying back to my base at about 12,000 feet, I saw three Dornier 17s and went straight in to attack. I shot one down, and as I was getting into position to shoot down a second one, a Messerschmitt 110—the twin-engine German fighter—got behind my tail, and repaid the compliment, setting my airplane on fire. I was panicking, and decided to get out with my parachute, and did all the necessary preparations. But when I tried to jump, I hit my head against the canopy—which probably saved my life because the flames were all around me and I was covered in petrol. If I had I opened the cockpit hood at that time, the flames would have come inside and enveloped me. But as it was, I was able to roll the plane upside down, the flames were swept in the opposite direction, and I fell out.

The parachute worked, but I'd hurt my back and my legs getting out of the aircraft—I thought I'd lost my leg, it was hurting so. Somehow I made a safe landing, but as I was climbing out of my parachute harness, five or six French peasants confronted me with pitchforks and scythes. They thought I was a German. I showed them my RAF wings, and then they couldn't have been more helpful.

They got me on a motorcycle and took me to a medical clearing station. There were no doctors there, just orderlies—and they had run out of anesthetic. Before they started to dig away and to extract the bullet fragments that were buried in my back, they gave me morphine. They said, “Do not worry about your leg, it is still there. There was only shrapnel doing all the harm in your leg.”

After digging out the metal from my back, they got me into a car, and took me to a train that took me to a French hospital at a town called Chartres.

About five of my squadron mates were killed during the period that I was laid up. When I made it back to England, the medical authorities had a good look at me and said, “He's fit enough to fly.” By now the Battle of Britain had started, and all I wanted to do was to get back into a fighter unit.

The Germans shifted tactics and started to bomb our fighter airfields. If they had kept it up—and gone after the radars—they might have knocked Fighter Command out of the skies over England. But then Hitler suddenly shifted tactics again and started to bomb London and ignored the fighter airfields. It was a big mistake for their air force. It gave Fighter Command a chance to recover—to replace planes and pilots and repair our air stations.

Because we had radars and a very good early warning network, we could launch our Hurricanes and Spitfires just in time to intercept the bombers as they were lining up to make their bomb runs over London—when they have to stay straight and level.

After a few weeks of heavy losses the German air force turned to night terror bombing—just trying to kill as many civilians as possible. Night attacks made their bombers harder to find, but it also meant that they weren't going to have as many Me-109s with them—and after a few weeks, we all got pretty good at night flying. I was credited with shooting down twenty-four and a half German planes—the half was because somebody else had already put some hits into one of them.

We encountered some French fighter pilots flying for the Germans. They would occasionally come over the Channel to test our defenses. I intercepted one over the Channel one day and indicated that he should come back with me, and land. But he indicated “no.” So, I had to get behind him as he turned, and shoot him down. That wasn't a very pleasant task, but a very wise officer once told me, “An order is an order and not an excuse for discussion.” That's the way it was in the war. If we were told to do something, we did it. That's how we did our jobs—we did them to the best of our ability.