Dogfight (4 page)

Towards the end of the course, pilots were often introduced to the most modern service machines available in preparation for their postings to active squadrons. Deere was selected for fighters, and proceeded to the last instalment of his preparation at No.6 Flying Training School, Netheravon, Wiltshire. With the completion of this first term, and the presentation of his Wings, he went on to fly the Hawker Fury: ‘This single-engine biplane fighter ... was a wonderful little aircraft and I shall always remember the first time I sat in the deep open cockpit, behind the small Perspex windshield, and the thrill of pride at being at last behind a real fighter aircraft.'[38] Gray found himself attached to No.11 Fighter Group Pool at St Athan, Glamorganshire. Here the New Zealander was introduced to the new North American Harvards; with an enclosed cockpit, retractable undercarriage and instrumentation for full blind flying, they were among the cutting-edge trainers of the day. Gray and Deere recall that their enjoyment of the last few days of training was tempered by the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939.

Two days later Britain declared war on Germany and it was clear that the airmen would soon be asked to put their training to the test in combat. New South Wales-born Paterson Hughes found his instruction overtaken by the German invasion of Poland, and a few days into the conflict he wrote home to his brother:

CHAPTER 2

For Hughes and the other Anzacs, the first few weeks of the war were spent in anticipation of combat. However, as September rolled over into October and October spilled into a wintry November, the first flush of excitement was replaced with a dull resignation; generalised aerial combat would be some months away. The so-called ‘phoney war' ushered in nine months of relative inactivity in Western Europe. In spite of guarantees given to Warsaw by London and Paris, little could be done to protect their Polish ally. Aside from very limited operations in the Saarland, French troops were, for the most part, cloistered within the Maginot Line and the most conspicuous martial activity undertaken by the RAF involved dropping, not bombs, but five million propaganda leaflets over Germany.[1]

In Britain, one and a half million mothers and children were evacuated from England's cities, only to return in the months that followed. For many Britons, wartime life was little different to that of the immediate prewar period. As they were posted out, fighter pilots discovered that fighting was not immediately on the agenda and the unexpected calm over winter was a welcome respite from an intensive training regime. Arrival at their new squadron homes and the lengthy hours of ‘readiness, occasional scrambles, some training flying, and boring convoy patrols' over the winter were, observed Deere, just the conditions that encouraged horseplay. Newcomers were invariably sent on a fruitless mission to locate the squadron's ‘oxometer'.

Deere had been posted to 54 Squadron, along with Gray, at Hornchurch, and as the unit's dogsbody he was assigned the Navigation Inventory. The only item missing was the phantom oxometer. His flight commander was adamant the New Zealander find the device due to its ‘vital importance to the squadron'. Deere's inability would doubtless incur the wrath of the
station commander, ‘a most frightening thought to a very junior officer on his first operational station'. It took the wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old days of searching before he realised he had been sent on a wild-goose chase. Once in on the gag, Deere and others took it to a new level by creating an oxometer, which the next unsuspecting pilot duly found and after being informed that it was designed to measure airspeed, was asked to ‘test' the device by blowing into it. ‘Our hero needed no second bidding; with gusto, he blew into the mouthpiece only to be covered with a fine spray of soot which had been placed inside the gadget ... squadron pilots, concealed in various spots around the hangar, witnessed and enjoyed this amazing experiment.'[2]

Senior officers who took their duties too seriously were irresistible targets for junior pilots. During the phoney war Kinder was posted to the Air Observers' School, Jurby, which at the time was under the command of a particularly odious officer. The Wing Commander's favourite torment was to turn the entire camp out of their beds in their nightclothes on the pretext of running a simulated enemy gas attack. In response, Kinder and the other pilots when returning from a mission would, at every opportunity, shoot-up the commanding officer's little yellow Ford 10. When others delivered him a message by replacing the base flag with a pair of bloomers, the commanding officer sent the entire camp, including the resident Women's Auxiliary Air Force personnel, on a twenty-mile march. Along the route WAAFs fell ‘thick and fast,' filling up the camp hospital.[3] The fiasco saw the officer transferred out.

Inclement weather curtailed flying opportunities and the fact that duty hours were reduced over winter facilitated more visits to pubs and lengthy liaisons with the opposite sex. Olive felt somewhat favoured because his posting to 65 Squadron, also at Hornchurch, meant that he and his fellow pilots were only thirty minutes by train from Piccadilly and thus the sights and sounds of London:

Overall though, compared ‘with the massive carnage of the First World War there seemed to be something wrong', Olive observed. ‘It was once said that war is a time of prolonged boredom punctuated by periods of intense fear. We were certainly having our share of boredom.' As uninspired as some pilots were, the phoney war was a blessing in disguise as it afforded the New Zealanders and Australians the opportunity to become better acquainted with the aircraft that would become synonymous with the Battle of Britain.

The Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire arrived along with the Anzacs in response to the rise of Hitler. In 1934, a year after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the British Air Ministry set its sights on machines more powerful than had previously graced England's skies. It issued specifications demanding a monoplane with a speed exceeding 300 mph and capable of flying at an altitude in excess of 33,000 feet. This called for an aircraft with slippery aerodynamics, retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit. In terms of armament, the Air Ministry calculated that given the speed of these new machines, any given attack would last only a couple of seconds. Therefore, in order to maximise the possibility of shooting down the enemy in these fleeting moments, the usual two guns would be boosted to a staggering eight machine-guns, each delivering 1000 rounds a minute.[5]

The first response to these specifications was the Hurricane. Kinder found the Hawker machine far faster and more lethal than its biplane predecessors. In good measure this was due to the installation of the Second World War's finest aviation engine: the Rolls-Royce twelve-piston Merlin. Delivering 1030 horsepower, it was twice as powerful as any power-plant of the Great War.[6] ‘Hurricanes were my favourites ... as they were so stable in rough weather or behind a jerry aircraft pumping lead into him,' concluded Kinder.[7] The Hurricane's well-known ease of maintenance and a supercharger modification in March 1940 made up for the slightly older construction methods that included the use of fabric covering.

Like the Hurricane, the Spitfire was a Merlin-powered monoplane. However, in two important areas it differed from the former. First, the airframe, following trends in France and Germany, was all metal, with the aircraft's skin supporting the structural load. Second, the distinctive
thin wings set it apart from the bulkier Hurricane appendages. Elliptical wings offered the possibility of reducing drag and thereby enhancing the aircraft's performance. This design feature was reproduced in the tail unit, giving the Spitfire its characteristic sleek, head-turning shape. Incremental improvements throughout its history greatly increased its performance and longevity as a frontline fighter. For the Battle of Britain the most important enhancement was the replacement of the original wooden two-blade, fixed-pitch propeller with a constant-speed, three-blade design. The constant-speed propeller varied the angle at which the blades cut into the air to allow the engine to run at a constant rate. The result was an increase in the Spitfire's operational ceiling. From mid-1940, Spitfires and Hurricanes were converted to the new propeller just in time for the Battle of Britain.

When the Anzacs got hold of the Spitfire they were smitten. ‘Everything in the plane was strange,' observed Spurdle the first time he squeezed himself into the machine:

In flight the Spitfire lived up to its promise. ‘Too many emotions of delight, pride, fear and complete out-of-this-world strangeness blurred,' enthused Spurdle. ‘I was alone as never before with a thousand horsepower and this beautiful little aeroplane.'[9] Hillary was equally intoxicated by his first jaunt. His flight officer, an Irishman, stood on the wing and ran through the instruments with him: ‘I was conscious of his voice, but heard nothing of what he said. I was to fly a Spitfire.' Upon landing, a close friend enquired ‘How was it?' to which Hillary replied, ‘Money for old rope' and made a circle of approval with his thumb and forefinger.[10] Before his next flight, he was told to ‘see if you can make her talk'. Given free rein, he ran through his repertoire of aerobatic manoeuvres ending with two flick rolls as he
made for the airfield. ‘I was filled with a sudden exhilarating confidence,' noted Hillary. ‘I could fly a Spitfire.'

Yet the Spitfire was not without its idiosyncrasies. As Gray noted, it needed a ‘fairly delicate touch'. In particular, on take-off, it had a disconcerting tendency to swing to the left that had to be countered by applying full right rudder until sufficient speed had been built up. Nevertheless, Gray, who flew both the Hurricane and Spitfire in battle, was in no doubt which was the superior machine. To his mind the Hurricane was, in comparison, a sluggish aircraft, whereas the Spitfire, ‘being so much more responsive, handled like a high-performance sports car.'[11] This was borne out during the war as Spitfires increasingly replaced Hurricanes across Fighter Command. Although Air Ministry orders for both machines were put out in the mid-1930s, the journey from design to production was smoother for the Hurricane. The marriage of tradition and modern features meant that its production commenced as soon as the order was made. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, 18 squadrons were equipped with some 400 Hurricanes, but only nine squadrons with Spitfires.[12]

Many of the Anzacs believed that the delay afforded the RAF by the phoney war was a key determinant in their Battle of Britain survival.[13] Gray pointed out that in December 1939 he had only seven hours' flying time in Spitfires. However, by the time he was thrust into battle five months later he had amassed many more. ‘In retrospect I consider 100 hours on type to be about right before being considered combat-ready for the first time—if only one had a choice in the matter—certainly not ten or twelve, which was about all some of our replacement pilots had at the height of the Battle of Britain.'[14] Deere went as far as to suggest that even the compromises of a year earlier in Munich were a blessing in disguise for RAF airmen.[15] Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's September 1938 acceptance of Hitler's offer at Munich has since entered the popular imagination as utterly wrong-headed, the height of appeasement of the Nazi regime, but at the time it did delay direct combat with a Luftwaffe that had a powerful advantage over Fighter Command in machines and experienced pilots. Munich and the phoney war allowed Anzac pilots the opportunity to gain valuable flying experience outside the demands of actual combat, including the occasional life-threatening mishap.

Olive's boredom was broken one particularly cold morning when, as one of the more experienced pilots, he was sent aloft to gauge the flying conditions for the rest of the squadron. As he pulled the Spitfire skywards
the cockpit was engulfed with white smoke billowing from the engine. In order to clear his field of vision, Olive put the Spitfire into a series of violent manoeuvres. His eventual landing was a lucky escape as the antifreeze glycol running though the radiator had found its way onto the hot engine via a ruptured pipe. This could prove fatal, since glycol was almost as flammable as aviation fuel and often in such situations the pilot and machine were lost.[16]

In another unfortunate incident, the freshly arrived Gray made himself known not only to his new 54 Squadron pilots, but also higher ranked RAF officials. With only about 20 hours on Spitfires at that time, Gray made a sweeping curve on his approach to Hornchurch in order to get a good look at the field before landing—like all Spitfire pilots, he was aware of the serious forward and downward visibility deficiencies of the aircraft. At the same time he noted a large black car travelling around the airfield perimeter track as he selected his landing area. Gray judged that he would easily clear the sedan. However, he failed to observe a poorly placed sandbagged aircraft dispersal bay thirty yards inside the perimeter track. Gray's undercarriage was sheared clean off as it clipped the top bags on the eight-foot-high bay. Unfortunately for the Kiwi airman, the large black vehicle was occupied by not only the station commander but also Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command. To make matters worse, Dowding had specifically requested that his driver slow down so they could ‘watch this young pilot land'. As he saw Gray belly-flop and plough up the airfield, Dowding turned to the station commander and exclaimed that ‘I could have sworn that the pilot had his wheels down!'[17] Adding insult to injury, Gray was battered by the full brunt of the station commander's ire after being marched into his office. With dented ego and crash-induced black eyes, Gray was threatened with drogue-towing duty. The young New Zealander survived the threat only to face a much sterner test and foretaste of what lay ahead, when the Germans began their campaign in Western Europe on 10 May 1940.

Within four days the neutral Netherlands had been crushed and the Belgians were in disorganised retreat. Shattering the phoney war, the main German effort sliced through the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest and then pushed a sickle-cut north to the French coast. The invasion gave a number
of the Anzacs their first opportunity to test themselves and their machines against the Luftwaffe. One of the few Anzac pilots on hand to meet the Germans was Edgar ‘Cobber' Kain. The lanky New Zealander of 73 Squadron had been posted, as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), to support the British Expeditionary Force in France. He became a household name thanks to a string of victories that went back to his first kill, a bomber over Metz. Utilising the newly introduced three-blade propeller, Kain pushed his Hurricane to what at the time was an unheard-of combat altitude of 27,000 feet.
The Times
relayed the drama to its readers: