Dogfight (10 page)

He now chanced his arm walking the last mile back to the airfield and was met by a local farmer at the wheel of his car. Did the Australian want a lift to the base? Olive replied, ‘Not bloody likely, I'm going to walk.'[37] With badly singed hair, mild skin burns, a broken foot and bruises the size of continents wrapping his body, he was given forty-eight hours by the doctor for recuperation.

Olive's exploding oxygen tank indicated how dependent the pilots were on the effective and timely maintenance of their machines by the ground crew. In general the Anzacs had a relatively egalitarian attitude toward their supporting team on the ground and treated them very well. ‘We could not have done it without them,' wrote Kinder. ‘They worked very long hours and in appalling conditions during the main fighting ... Speed was the essential in the re-arming and re-fuelling [of] aircraft after combat and our men did a magnificent job. A whole squadron was refuelled and rearmed in two minutes flat. Armourers would climb onto the aircraft wings before it had stopped, belts of ammunition draped over their shoulders.'[38]

‘They were terrific,' noted former Marlborough sheep musterer James Hayter; keeping ‘twelve aircraft in the air was a hell of job'. The New Zealander got very attached to his ground crew, to the point of picking up some of their habits. Hayter confessed that he had never smoked a cigarette until they offered him one, and then ‘I started to love smoking ... [and] smoked like a chimney afterwards.'[39]

The mechanics were particularly favoured by some of the pilots. Deere's chief mechanic throughout the Battle of Britain was G.F. ‘Ricky' Richardson. The New Zealander was particularly fussy when it came to his machine and demanded that it be ready at all times. ‘All the other pilots would take any other machine if theirs wasn't serviceable,' recalled Richardson, ‘but with Alan you had to work till two or three o'clock in the morning.' Yet, as he noted, both Deere and Gray, as ‘the only colonials', were ‘different to our chaps in the RAF; there was no side at all to them, it would be “Ricky this” and “Ricky that”.'[40]

Attacks by German aircraft continued, but at a lower intensity due to the poor prevailing weather conditions and the need to conserve aircraft for the next phase. The final significant throws against the convoys occurred on 8 and 11 August. Terrifyingly, at 3.00a.m., a convoy of twenty merchant vessels and nine Royal Navy ships, codenamed ‘Peewit', was assaulted by massed German E-boats. The fast motor torpedo boats created havoc, sinking three ships and seriously damaging three more. Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to administer the coup de grâce to the scattered vessels, in what would become the biggest attack on a convoy in the Battle of Britain.

After 8.30a.m. on 8 August, dive-bombers and fighters assembled on the French side of the Channel. Park dispatched five squadrons to meet the threat. The resulting aerial battle successfully prevented any further vessels from being hit but, at midday, a larger Luftwaffe effort was made. The force included fifty-seven Ju 87s, twenty Me 110s and, at altitude overseeing the proceedings, thirty Me 109s. Three squadrons of Hurricanes and one of Spitfires were vectored to intercept. Among them were the Australians Clive Mayers and Curchin. The Cambridge-educated Mayers had only been with the Tangmere-based 601 Squadron for five days, while the former Victorian Curchin had made his home with 609 since 11 June 1940. Within minutes both found themselves embroiled in a large, freewheeling dogfight.

As an Me 109 swept across the nose of Mayers' Hurricane he turned to follow. Closing to within fifty yards, his five-second burst from the eight machine-guns was enough to dispatch the enemy, trailing smoke, into the Channel.[42] Curchin's Spitfire was aimed at a Me 110 and, closing in to 100 yards, he delivered a long burst, silencing the rear gunner who had been firing frantically at the Australian. In moments another of the twin-engine heavy fighters came into view and he opened fire. ‘I gave him the rest of my ammunition,' wrote Curchin in his after-action report, and a ‘white puff of smoke came out of the fuselage and he turned on his back—[then] did a nose dive.'[43] Out of ammunition, he turned for home.

Although the two pilots had a kill each, the Ju 87s were able to break through and sink four vessels. At 3.30p.m. the final Stuka-led attack was undertaken with an even greater collection of machines. By the end of the day, of the twenty-seven vessels that set sail, only four had made it to their destination; the rest had either been sunk or so badly damaged they were forced to seek shelter. The Luftwaffe had lost nineteen aircraft and
twenty-two men, and the RAF seventeen fighters and eight men killed.

On 11 August, the final day of the
Kanalkampf,
two Australians and two New Zealanders were again in the thick of the effort. Early German activity near Dover was merely a feint; the real target of the day was the Portland naval base. Park was informed of a concentration of enemy machines within the vicinity of Cherbourg Peninsula. Fighter Command put eight squadrons up in preparation for the inevitable attacks. In over five raids the Germans deployed nearly 200 aircraft in all. South Australian John Cock was one of six pilots in B Flight, 87 Squadron. A veteran of the fighting in France, he looked older than his twenty-two years, and already had a slew of confirmed and probables recorded in his logbook.[44]

The squadron's late-morning targets were the Ju 88 bombers that had just set alight the oil storage tanks at Portland. Dirty black smoke cloaked the port, punctuated by fires burning brightly at the hospital and other buildings. Before reaching the bombers, Cock crossed paths with an Me 109 into which he unleashed a hail of fire, tearing chunks off the machine. His next target was a Ju 88. The Brownings set one wing alight, but Cock was unable to follow the bomber down as the Hurricane was suddenly peppered with cannon and bullets, destroying the instrument panel and damaging the engine. The Australian, nursing a bullet nick to the shoulder, inverted the aircraft, tugged himself free from a snag in the cockpit and opened his parachute in the midst of the free-for-all dogfight. All too soon he was aware that he was being fired on by a Messerschmitt and, in fact, a number of the cords attaching him to his parachute were severed by the enemy's attempts to kill him mid-air. Mercifully a fellow RAF pilot intervened, dispatching the enemy pilot and machine.[45]

Once in the water, Cock divested himself of his boots and trousers in an aquatic dash for the shore. Overhead and monitoring events, a fellow 87 Squadron pilot laughed all the way back to base after seeing the bedraggled and trouser-less Australian crawl from the surf.[46] For his troubles Cock was put on leave for a month. The other Australian, Walch, was less fortunate. A massive formation of Me 109s caught his section of 238 Squadron completely outnumbered and three pilots were killed. The loss of Walch was a blow to the squadron as the Tasmanian was well known for taking less experienced pilots under his wing. It would appear that his death was precipitated by an attempt to rescue two young men from overwhelming odds.[47]

Among the Kiwis involved in operations over Portland were Squadron
Leader Hector McGregor and Cobden. A graduate of Napier Boys' High School, McGregor was a good half-dozen years older than most Anzac pilots in the Battle of Britain, and prior to the war had commanded squadrons in Egypt and Palestine.[48] The Distinguished Service Order (DSO) recipient had returned to Britain in 1940 and taken over the command of the Biggin Hill-based 213 Squadron. At 10.30a.m., his Hurricane squadron intercepted approximately 50 bombers and 30 single-engine fighters at 10,000 feet.

Twenty-six-year-old Cobden had shot down one of the first bombers of the campaign, but would lose his life on 11 August. The squadron took up patrolling duties over a convoy. Forty Me 110s were attacked and formed a defensive circle. In the ensuing struggle, the former All Black was shot down off Harwich and his body recovered by the enemy. The New Zealander was buried at the Oostende New Communal Cemetery, Belgium. Cobden's death closed off the first phase of the Battle of Britain—it was his birthday.[50]

CHAPTER 5

By early August, on the Nazi-occupied side of the Channel, the Germans were confident enough to finalise planning for the aerial assault on Britain proper. On 30 July, Hitler told Göring to prepare his forces for ‘the great battle of the Luftwaffe against England' and two days later a directive was issued with a view to undertaking ‘the final conquest of England'. Strengthened German forces would now turn from the convoys to a direct contest with the RAF, with a view to overpowering it ‘in the shortest possible time'. Hitler hoped that within a fortnight after the commencement of the air battle he would be in a position to issue orders for the invasion. The forces of Kesselring, Sperrle and, to a lesser extent, Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen Stumpff's Luftflotte 5 in Norway, would undertake attacks ‘primarily against flying air units, their ground installations and their supply organisations, also against the aircraft industry, including the manufacturing of anti-aircraft equipment'.[1]

On 2 August, Göring issued his orders for the 14-day battle, dramatically dubbed
Adlerangriff
(Eagle Attack). Confidence was high, as the Luftwaffe believed that, after offsetting Fighter Command losses and new production, the RAF only had 450 single-engine fighters on hand—in reality it was closer to 750. The campaign's commencement,
Adlertag
(Eagle Day), was dependent on a three-day clear-weather window. On 12 August, the meteorologists confirmed the good weather was upon them and Göring pencilled in the next day as
Adlertag.
In preparation, the Luftwaffe was tasked with blinding Fighter Command by knocking out the radar towers running along the south-east coast from the Thames Estuary to Portsmouth. In addition, forward RAF bases at Lympne, Hawkinge and Manston, which had been used so effectively in defending the convoys, were to be raided.

The day broke clear on 12 August but with some mist patches. An early decoy attack was followed closely by the real objective of the morning, the radar network. It was the first real test of Dowding's carefully planned and prepared defensive system. Dowding, like many of those walking the corridors of power in the RAF in the early 1940s, had been an airman in the Great War and witnessed the attacks by massive Zeppelin airships and Gotha G.V. heavy bombers. Inter-war strategists drew two differing conclusions from the German aerial assaults.[2] On the one hand, some commanders believed fighters offered the best possibility of thwarting bomber offensives, while on the other hand, many theorists believed the Zeppelin-Gotha raids indicated the best form of defence was a bombing offensive.

Of these two views, the latter gained ascendancy in the inter-war era and became the received wisdom among many air-power thinkers. While the results of the bombing had been relatively modest, they did feed into public fears that, in a future war, larger, higher flying and more heavily defended bombers would wreak havoc on dense urban populations and destroy morale. The influential Italian Giulio Douhet suggested that victory in future wars could be attained by air power alone. As already mentioned with regard to Olive's failed attempt to get assigned to bombers, this theory accentuated the role of the bomber over the fighter in any future contest.

Spearheaded by Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, Britain's Independent Air Force (the forerunner of the RAF) initially emphasised the need to build up a potent bomber striking force. Yet, with the growth of Germany's own aerial capabilities in the 1930s, it was recognised that Britain needed to balance this bomber strategy with an effective system of air defence around fighters. As part of a total reorganisation of the air force, Fighter Command was established in July 1936 under the command of Dowding. In contrast to Trenchard's myopic bombing mantra, Dowding suggested that:

Dowding's appointment ushered in a four-year period of intense work in which he threw himself into the creation of an integrated air defence system. Nicknamed ‘Stuffy', Dowding was an austere man with few close friends, but his organisational skills, technological knowledge and flying experience all combined to produce what became known as the ‘Dowding System'.[4] The result was a complex but resilient network that incorporated, among other things, radar; the rapid filtering and dissemination of large amounts of information; the devolution of tactical control to local commanders; and the plotting of enemy and RAF aircraft across a widely dispersed geographical area.

Dowding was one of the first airmen to recognise the importance of radar. At the turn of the century it was already known that solid objects reflected radio waves and in the early part of the twentieth century work began on military applications of this knowledge. When in 1935 a bomber was observed by the displacement of a radio signal, Dowding was reported to have declared that this was a ‘discovery of the highest order'.[5] At his urging, a chain of transmitter-receiver stations that could pick up aircraft 100 miles away was established along the coastline from southern Britain to the Shetland Islands. Codenamed Chain Home, this was supplemented by the Chain Home Low system that was capable of detecting aircraft flying at lower altitudes. In the hands of a skilled operator, data from radar—known at the time as Radio Direction Finding—made it possible to assess the range, bearing, strength and, with some qualification, the altitude of intruders.

Once aircraft passed over the Chain Home, aircraft were visually tracked by the Royal Observer Corps, numbering some 30,000 personnel. Information from radar and the observers was phoned through to Dowding's Filter Room at Fighter Command's Bentley Priory HQ and then to the relevant operational commands of the four regional Groups. These Groups were in turn divided into sectors. By way of illustration, Park's south-east 11 Group contained seven sectors controlled from, and including, Tangmere: Kenley, Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, North Weald, Debden and Northolt. These sector airfields were in charge of smaller outlying airfields. A sector would generally contain two to three squadrons but on occasion as many as six. The decision on how these squadrons would be tactically utilised was not made by Dowding but by the relevant group commander, who determined what targets were to be attacked and by what units in his inventory. The local sectors vectored pilots to the intruders and home again by the use of
radio. Plotting the movement of enemy and friendly aircraft at each level—Fighter Command HQ, Groups and the Sectors—was carried out on large map tables on which wooden blocks representing enemy formations were shuffled around with croupier's rakes in the hands of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Operational decisions were made by the officers on a balcony above the table.

The advantages of the system were considerable and made possible the successes of the RAF pilots during the Battle of Britain. First, men and machines could be more effectively utilised. Without the Dowding System, Fighter Command's only means of protecting Britain would have been the employment of costly and impractical standing patrols. Dowding's scheme allowed for pilots and machines to be employed at the right moment and with the greatest impact. Second, the system enabled the centre to oversee the whole enterprise but gave control of the fighting units to local commanders. This overcame the impossibility of Fighter Command HQ controlling all the various elements at one time and allowed for tactical flexibility at the point of contact. Third, adaptability was inherent in the system. For example, as it became clear that a sector was about to come under assault, the local sector commander could bypass the Filter Room at Bentley Prior to communicate directly with the observer network in order more rapidly to determine the location of the intruders.

It was also possible for a Group to call on fighters from another Group, and fighters taking off from one sector's airfield might find themselves landing in another sector's airfields as the need arose. What all this meant, in the words of one Battle of Britain biographer, was that the ‘Spitfires always seemed to turn up at the right place and at the right time'.[6] ‘From the very beginning,' noted Major Adolf Galland, a leading pilot and commander in the German campaign,

The initial assault put the southernmost radar stations out of action for some six hours. They were not, however, destroyed. The skeletal wood-and-wire construction dispersed the bombs' blast and facilitated quick repair. Nevertheless the damage created a gap in the Dowding System and it meant that the attacks on the convoys by Ju 87s a little after 10.00a.m. were carried out without interference.[8] It was nearly a full hour before 65 Squadron operating out of Manston was alerted to the need to get into the air. As the airfield closest to the French coast, it would become a constant target of German efforts. Olive and the men of the squadron were some of the first to feel the effects of the new German initiative.

Soon after midday the pilots were woken out of their half sleep by the urgent order to scramble and within a few minutes Olive was jumping into his Spitfire:

With that the 12-cylinder Merlin spluttered into raucous life. Olive led a six-aircraft flight as he taxied to take off into the wind. The day was sunny and warm and the departure routine no different from hundreds he had undertaken over the preceding months. In the small space before opening the Spitfire up and roaring down the runway, the Australian awaited the takeoff order to crackle through the radio. The machines began to roll forward, only to be interrupted by explosives smashing the aircraft hangars.

To the Australian's complete shock he realised German raiders were laying down a heavy blanket of bombs on the base. Within moments he was in a field of earthen ‘geysers' spewing dirt and massive sods of grass. More buildings disappeared as bombs crept towards to the fighters. Shockwaves buffeted the light-framed Spitfires, rocking Olive in his cockpit. When two bombs landed nearby, he and the Spitfire were hit by the blast like a ‘huge invisible hammer'. Racing down the runway, he glanced over his shoulder to catch sight of nearly 200 bombers attacking in formation
at barely 500 feet—close enough to see the distinctive black crosses polluting the sky.

The real danger, he realised, was the prospect of being swamped by the rapidly advancing sticks of bombs. A tsunami of ordnance was gaining on the last aircraft. To his left the other flight was engulfed in a wall of bombs. As they emerged from the smoke and airborne debris, remarkably only one aircraft was incapacitated. Mercifully the ground gave way to flight; Olive was airborne. Behind him he saw another Spitfire claw loose from the smoke. Travelling at twice Olive's speed, two blunt-nosed Me 109s overshot his flight as they climbed out of the carnage. He was amazed to see his wing men still in tow unscathed. The bombers were by now some distance ahead, making for the gathering cloud cover that would thwart any attempts to get even with the raiders, though two Me 109s that chanced into the flight path of the squadron were shot down.[10]

Returning to the airfield gave all the pilots a bird's-eye view of their narrow escape. Dipping the Spitfire's elliptical wings, Olive circled Manston. He saw what would prove to be over 600 craters disfiguring the airfield, and the detritus of various buildings cast far and wide. Most sobering were the two lines of craters bisecting the length of the runway, a deadly furrow under which he had almost been ploughed.

‘From start to finish,' he recalled, ‘the bomb lines were over a mile and a half long. Just one of those bombs, had it dropped in front of us, could have destroyed our entire team.'[11] ‘Miracles' could happen, Olive concluded. A pockmarked Manston was out of action and the raids on Lympne and Hawkinge were similarly effective.

Further attacks augmented the assault on the radar towers, convoys and airfields. Kesselring and Sperrle's plans called for a renewed assault on the naval base at Portland, with Portsmouth's naval port and industries, a bombing run against the important Spitfire factory at Woolston and attacks on the Isle of Wight's Ventnor radar station thrown in for good measure. Among the airmen Park's 11 Group dispatched to meet the intruders were the New Zealanders McGregor and Wycliff Williams, 266 Squadron, and John Gibson, 501 Squadron. The indefatigable McGregor was set to even the score after losing one of his flight commanders and four pilots only the day before.[12] With the sun near its midday apex the elder statesman of the squadron ordered his men to attack the swiftly fleeing machines. McGregor latched on to an Me 110 approximately 20 miles south of the Isle of Wight at 4000 feet. Dismissive of the pilot's attempts to evade his fire, the Kiwi
pilot released a series of short bursts from his Hurricane: ‘After the third burst the enemy aircraft dived steeply into the sea. No one got out.'[13] In spite of his efforts the squadron lost two more pilots and the radar station was knocked out.

‘Wick' Williams' previously uneventful war took a decidedly eventful turn. Williams, who hailed from Dunedin, and his Tangmere-based squadron were faced with a force advancing on Portsmouth. The thirty or so Ju 88 bombers were intercepted and he found himself in a whirling dogfight. ‘Wick' had latched on to an enemy machine when ‘two Spitfires and one Hurricane came from the starboard side between [the] target' and himself.[14] The twenty-year-old grappled with the controls, breaking off the engagement to avoid imminent collision. Catching his breath, he observed a single Ju 88. Climbing to 11,500 feet he delivered a stern attack. ‘I saw my tracer bullets contacting ... [with the] fuselage, [and] almost at once,' the relieved South Islander noted, ‘silencing the rear gunner from whom tracer bullets had been coming towards me.' He fired again and red flames leapt from the engine. The undercarriage was prematurely released by the damage inflicted and he saw the glow of fire burning brightly in the empty cavity. Fighting for its life, the bomber exacted its revenge, and machinegun fire punctured Williams' oil system and the windscreen was covered in a poor imitation of black icing.