Wings (21 page)

Then the Germans began their great surge westwards. This had been long expected. Bomber Command’s job was to attack advancing troops and to disrupt supply lines by destroying railways,
roads and bridges. A number of bomber squadrons had been based in France since the start of the war. Eight of them were equipped with Fairey Battles. In their first, occasional encounters with the
enemy it was clear that these were bad aeroplanes. They carried a three-man crew and were protected by two small-calibre machine guns, one mounted in a wing and the other in the rear. They were
slow, a hundred
miles an hour slower than the Luftwaffe fighters they would face. Nonetheless, the men who flew them continued to cling to hope. According to one of the
fighter pilots waiting alongside them for the fighting to start, they were ‘pathetically confident in their tight formation with their fire-concentration tactics. We admired their flying and
guts, but although we gave them as much practice and encouragement as we could, we privately didn’t give much for their chances.’
³

So it turned out. On the morning of 10 May the German forces began to flow into the Lowlands like a river of molten lava. From midday, Battles, arranged in small formations of eight, set off to
try and stop them. Ranged against them were great swarms of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers, sometimes hundreds strong. Of the thirty-two British bombers deployed, thirteen were shot down. The
others returned riddled with flak, cannon rounds and bullets. There was nothing to show for the losses. The columns they had been sent to attack had usually moved on by the time the Battles
arrived.

The battering continued. On 12 May Battles of the Belgian air force had been attempting to bomb the bridges over the Albert canal to the west of Maastricht to deny passage to the advancing
Germans. They failed, losing ten of the fifteen aircraft that took part. Then it was the turn of Bomber Command’s 12 Squadron, also equipped with Battles. There was an appeal for six crews.
The entire squadron stepped forward, so the first six on the duty roster were selected. One was unable to take off when its hydraulics failed, but the rest swooped down on the bridges at
Vroenhoeven and Veldwezelt. Only one aircraft
made it back, sieved with shot and shell. There were devastating losses elsewhere on the Front. In two days of fighting, the
entire RAF force in France had been halved from 135 to 72.

With the blitzkrieg rippling towards France there was no longer any virtue in restraint. Any remaining hopes that the Germans might choose a more scrupulous approach against Western targets than
they had shown against Polish ones were shattered with the mass bombing of Rotterdam. After some dithering, permission was given for an attack on road and rail junctions at Mönchengladbach.
This was the first of thousands of raids directed at German towns. The results were negligible, but four civilians were killed by the tumbling bombs. Three were Germans: Carl Lichtschlag,
sixty-two, Erika Mullers, twenty-two, and a two-year-old girl called Ingeborg Schey. The fourth was a British citizen. Ella Ida Clegg had been born fifty-three years before to a British father, who
left Oldham to work as a factory foreman in the Rhine. Nothing else is known about her. She was listed in official records only as a ‘volunteer’. The first corpses had names, but that
did not last long. Soon these losses became commonplace and names gave way to numbers.

Four days later Bomber Command at last set out to implement its grand design, laid out in the pre-war Western Air Plans: to paralyse the enemy by attacks on its oil supply and transport nexus.
Ninety-nine aircraft – thirty-nine Wellingtons, thirty-six Hampdens and twenty-four Whitleys – flew off to attack sixteen targets in Germany’s industrial heartland in the
Ruhr.

Nothing much happened. Most of the aircraft dropped their bombs, but to little effect. The standard of accuracy was abysmal. One bomb apparently aimed at a factory in
Dormagen landed instead on a large farm, killing a dairyman, Franz Romeike, who was on his way to the lavatory. Some bombs fell on Münster – even though it was not on the list of towns
to be hit. This black farce was the opening scene of one of the war’s great dark dramas.

‘Thus began the Bomber Command strategic air offensive against Germany,’ wrote Noble Frankland, himself a bomber navigator and the author with Sir Charles Webster of the official
history of the campaign. ‘For many years it was the sole means at Britain’s disposal for attacking the heart of the enemy, and, more than any other form of armed attack upon the enemy,
it never ceased until almost exactly five years later Germany, with many of her cities in ruins, her communications cut, her oil supplies drained dry and her industry reduced to chaos, capitulated
. . . It was probably the most continuous and gruelling operation of war ever carried out.’
⁴

The fighter squadrons based in France, and those sent over from England to join them, were swept up and tossed around by the tempest blowing across the flatlands of Flanders. Flying Officer
Maurice Stephens, a Cranwell graduate, had flown off from Kenley with the rest of 3 Squadron just after midday on the day of the German attack. He bumped down on the grass at Merville, an old RFC
base, to see that, despite all the time the defenders had had to prepare, confusion reigned. ‘On the far side of the airfield another Hurricane squadron had just
arrived,’ he wrote. ‘There was feverish activity as pilots and ground crew sorted the mass of equipment which had been hastily unloaded from the transport aircraft.’
They ‘snatched a hasty lunch of bully beef and biscuits, with the inevitable mug of strong, over-sweet tea’. Then, over the field telephone came an order for a flight of six aircraft to
patrol a line between Maastricht and Bree in Belgium, where the German forces were expected to attempt the breakthrough into France. There was only one map available, which was given to the flight
commander; the other pilots were expected to follow him. They saw nothing ‘except roads packed solid with the pathetic stream of refugees. It was to become a depressingly familiar
sight.’

Back at Merville they were refuelling when a formation of Heinkel 111s appeared and began dropping bombs. ‘We took off in whatever direction we happened to be pointing, hoping to catch the
Heinkels,’ Stephens wrote. ‘It was hopeless. There was no radar, no fighter control at all. We were just wasting aircraft and hazarding aircraft in the hopes of finding our quarry in
the gathering darkness.’

They kipped in a Nissen hut at the airfield and awoke at dawn to take to the skies, pitting themselves against an enemy that swept forward with all the inexorability of a force of nature. This
time events were more satisfactory. Stephens was patrolling with five other 3 Squadron Hurricanes between Saint-Trond and Diest in Belgium. They realized now that the absence of radar and ground
control made little difference, as ‘the scale of enemy air activity was so great that the odds
were very much in favour of making contact’. Sure enough,
‘suddenly we spotted about sixty tiny black dots . . . flying west like a swarm of midges. The next moment we were among them – Stukas, with an escort of about twenty Me
109s.’

Stephens manoeuvred his Hurricane behind one of the dive-bombers until it was framed in his reflector sight, then ‘opened fire from about fifty yards’. The range could hardly have
been closer and the approach would have won the approval of Mannock and Ball. The effect was spectacular. ‘After a short burst he blew up in an orange ball of flame, followed by a terrifying
clatter as my Hurricane flew through the debris.’ Stephens went on to shoot down a Dornier 17 before his fuel warning light glowed red and he looked for somewhere to put down.
⁵

The British fighters put up a terrific fight against the Luftwaffe, inflicting more casualties than they suffered. But the numbers were overwhelmingly against them and the impressive paper
strength of their allies in the Armée de l’Air was illusory. The French Air Force were unreliable allies and co-operation was ragged and sometimes only grudgingly given, and, by the
end, often not at all. The squadrons were soon reeling. Every aircraft shot down or abandoned in the headlong retreat (which mirrored the experience of the RFC in the opening weeks of the First
World War) was one less machine to defend Britain.

On 13 May the first German tanks crossed the Meuse. The following day, seventeen British fighter pilots were killed or mortally wounded. Twenty-seven Hurricanes had been shot down.
These attrition rates could not be sustained, yet the French were still clamouring for more aircraft. Churchill was inclined to oblige them, but Hugh Dowding, Fighter Command’s
austere chief, resisted further sacrifice.. As it was, the hopeless defence had thinned the ranks of men and aircraft alarmingly. The fighters had knocked down about 300 enemy aircraft, but they
had lost just over 200 in the process. Altogether, fifty-six pilots were killed in the twelve days between 10 and 21 May, with another thirty-six badly wounded. Most of them had been extensively
and expensively trained, and had far more theoretical preparation for aerial war fighting than those who were going through the flying schools at home. Some units had been eviscerated by the
fighting. When Stephens and 3 Squadron returned to England after ten days, just before the arrival of the Germans, they left behind nine dead pilots.

There was no time to lick wounds, for another battle was already looming. At Dunkirk, some half a million British and French troops were penned in with the sea at their backs, awaiting the
Germans’ final onslaught. The honour of finishing them off had been given to the Luftwaffe. Their leader, Hermann Goering, had promised Hitler it would be an easy task. The RAF now had the
duty of defending the exhausted lines of soldiers, waiting stoically on the beaches for salvation. Like the airmen of the last war, the RAF pilots had a detached view of the battlefield, one that
was unlikely to make them want to swap their role, whatever its dangers, for the life of a foot-soldier. Brian Kingcome of 92 Squadron looked down from the cockpit of his Spitfire and saw
‘beaches [that] were
a shambles, littered with the smoking wreckage of engines and equipment . . . The sands erupted into huge geysers from exploding bombs and shells,
while a backdrop to the scene of carnage and destruction was provided by the palls of oily black smoke rising from the burning harbour and houses.’ He marvelled at how the ‘orderly
lines of our troops stood, chaos and Armageddon at their backs, patiently waiting their turn to wade into the sea’.
⁶

The task meant not only mounting continuous patrols above the port and beaches, but roaming behind the lines to intercept the attackers before they could reach their victims. These sorties took
place out of sight of the troops, leading to many a shouted accusation of ‘Where was the RAF?’ in the weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation, and many a brawl. The charge was unjust. Awful
as the experience of the evacuation was, it would have been immeasurably worse were it not for the efforts of Fighter Command. Churchill acknowledged this in his speech in the House of Commons on 4
June 1940, when he spoke of the ‘victory’ that had been won by the air force. For the pilots of Fighter Command the satisfaction of having tested themselves against the Luftwaffe and
not been found wanting could not be savoured for long. It was clear at the beginning of June that the real showdown awaited them and it would not be long in coming.

In July 1940 the greatest air battle ever fought began. Nothing like it had happened before. Nothing like it would happen again. The military and political consequences of it
were colossal, shaping the way we live and think today. As well as being one of the great events of history, the Battle of Britain was also the moment when the RAF came of age. Fighter
Command’s victory embedded the air force in the minds and hearts of the nation, and validated, resoundingly, the existence of the third service.

One of the unique characteristics of the battle was its visibility. Civilians were able to watch their defenders in action. Men, women and children could look up from city streets, suburban
avenues and country lanes, and see tiny machines twisting and swooping, streams of glittering tracer, ragged banners of oily smoke, the blossoming of a parachute and afterwards, the fading chalk
marks scribbled in the cornflower blue of an English summer sky by the condensation trails.

A sophisticated seventeen-year-old, Colin Walker Downes, was staying with his mother in Hampstead and watched as ‘the RAF fighters weaved their white vapour trails
through the lace pattern of the Luftwaffe bombers and fighters against a background of deep azure’. Downes’s reaction was similar to that of every young male who witnessed these sights.
He ‘longed to join the gallant Few’. Unlike most, his wish was granted and he ended the war as a fighter pilot.
¹

The spectators’ fates and those of the young men fighting in their name were vitally intertwined. The Government seized on this fact to cement social cohesion, and propaganda moved fast to
associate the airmen with those they were fighting to protect.