The Fatal Englishman (21 page)

Hillary felt no pity because he knew that none would have been shown to him. The exercise seemed to have some chivalric dignity which robbed it of selfish emotion. Broody Benson, who had been so keen to get at the Germans, was killed in this first engagement.

The losses that followed daily in August and September were greeted calmly at the airfield. The men were not callous, but they were indifferent. They were so wholly engaged in what they were doing, so mentally and physically committed to the fight, on which, after all, their own lives depended, that they felt they had no time to grieve. They were always outnumbered and were therefore rarely able to keep their formation; they would land individually over a period of minutes, sometimes hours, and the fate of each man in the squadron took time to determine. Prolonged absence was not necessarily the prelude to news of another death; a pilot who had parachuted from a stricken plane might take some time to reach a telephone.

They found that what the men of No. 1 Squadron had taught them was true: if the Germans did not have numerical superiority they would not engage but would turn round and head back for the Channel. The sun caused problems for all the pilots. Hillary did not wear his dark-lensed goggles because they interfered with his vision and made him feel shut in; before going into action he would push them up on to his forehead. He also refused to wear gloves because they were too hot and decreased his sensitivity on the controls.

Richard Hillary continued to flout the rules. The War had become exactly what he had hoped: exciting, individual and disinterested. Up in the air the pilots were as selfishly engaged and motivated, as free from discipline, as it was possible for a fighting force to be. They accepted the concomitant risk not so much without qualm as without thought. There was the possibility of fighting in a way that protected your friends but also gave you room for the most extreme form of self-expression. In
one of the outstanding sequences of
The Last Enemy
Richard Hillary described such a flight in the language of rapture.

It was early evening in the last week in August. Brian Carbury had received a bullet wound in the foot and Hillary was to take his place in the next ‘show’. The day was uncharacteristically quiet; by six o’clock they were still playing cards in the mess. Then came the voice of the controller: ‘Six-o-three Squadron take off and patrol base: further instructions in the air.’

They were detailed to intercept twenty enemy fighters at 25,000 feet. Hillary looked through the glass of his cockpit to the plane next to his. He could see Hugh Stapleton’s mouth moving. This usually meant he was singing; sometimes he would do this with his radio-transmitter (R/T) switched to ‘send’, so that the others would receive their instructions from the ground against a background of ‘Night and Day’. On this occasion Hillary picked up the Germans on his headset and shouted back as many pieces of invective as he could remember from his schoolboy holidays abroad. Below them, above the pattern of the English fields on a hot August evening, they watched the German planes form a tight defensive circle, a formation which could only be broken up by dangerously exposed individual attacks.

The Spitfires peeled off into an echelon starboard formation and down in a series of power dives. After picking out his machine and discharging his guns into the nose, Hillary had to pull out in a climb so steep he felt his eyes being driven down into his neck. Then as he circled above them he could see that the attack had successfully broken up the defensive circle. It then became a matter of individual dog-fights. He saw Peter Pease making a head-on attack on a Messerchmitt; the two planes were on a collision course, both firing. Then, just before they would have crashed, the German pulled up, and the grateful Pease was able to fire full into his belly.

The sky was alive with the sound of fighter planes, diving, roaring, spinning, and with the sound of their guns, fired sometimes in long-distance optimism, sometimes in desperate self-defence. Hillary found the sweat coursing down his face. Then suddenly the noise was gone. He looked round for the reflection of the evening sun on metal and saw nothing. This
instantaneous dispersal and isolation could happen at any time; the obvious thing for Hillary to do was to return to base. About a mile away, however, he spotted a formation of about forty Hurricanes and set off to join them. The only reason for doing this was bravado: he had some ammunition left and was enjoying being up in the sky.

Just as he was coming in behind them, he looked down and saw, roughly 5,000 feet below, another formation of about fifty planes flying in the same direction. He knew that there were not that many Hurricanes available to make such a ‘step-up’ formation in this part of England: he had made a serious mistake. He looked again at the last plane in the formation he had been about to join and saw that it was carrying a swastika. The Germans seemed unaware that a lone Spitfire was on their tail, with the sun behind him. Hillary kept his nerve in a way that Peter Pease could have admiringly predicted. He closed to within 150 yards, then fired a three-second burst into the tail of the last enemy aircraft. It went over on its back and spun down out of sight. Hillary looked round him for signs of retaliation, but still none of the other planes seemed to have noticed. He considered trying to take out the next plane in the formation in the same way, but decided in a moment of rare discretion to be satisfied with a single kill. He peeled off in a half-roll and headed back to the station, where he found to his irritation that Berry was claiming to have shot down three.

The Battle of Britain had many crises, but there was no more continuous anguish than that suffered in the last week of August and the first of September.

On 13 August Goering had sent his aircraft into battle for what he imagined would be the knock-out blow. He termed it
Adlertag
or Eagle Day. German intelligence reports persuaded him to believe that attacks on the previous two days had made radar defences in the south of England inoperative and that 11 Group, whose twenty-two squadrons covered the south east, was down to its last planes.
Adlertag
consisted of attacks on the north of England as well, but Dowding, despite much advice to the contrary, had long been reluctant to move all his fighters to the
south-east, and the German attackers therefore met unexpected resistance over the coast of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. The Luftwaffe lost seventy-six planes in a day, compared to thirty-four British.

They had more in reserve. When the first major attack came on London on 7 September, Air Vice Marshal Park, a New Zealander who was in charge of the critical South East 11 Group, had not only to scramble every fighter he had but to call in five squadrons from the adjacent 12 Group which had been assembled under Douglas Bader at Duxford in Cambridgeshire. When at the height of the battle Churchill asked Park how many fighters he had left, Park answered, ‘None, sir’.

By the end of August the slow attrition was working in Germany’s favour. Although the Spitfires and Hurricanes were always finishing the day slightly ahead, the British were starting to run out of pilots. Dowding had to take men out of squadrons that were supposed to be resting or re-forming in order to fill the constantly recurring gaps in the squadrons of 11 Group in the south-east.

Jack Wolfenden, the thirty-four-year-old headmaster of Uppingham, a public school in Rutland, was eventually seconded to the Air Ministry to coordinate the recruitment and training of more young pilots. It was a desperate move, whose results were not available until the following year. In September 1940, Dowding and Park faced a crisis of manpower that appeared to have only one outcome, the defeat of the RAF and the conquest of Britain.

At this moment Hitler, impatient at the extraordinary resilience of the RAF, ordered Goering to change his tactics. Instead of clearing the skies of RAF defences, Hitler now wanted to see London burn, and it was to this end that Goering switched his attacks to the capital on 7 September. The error of this change of tactic was not immediately obvious since, as Park’s desperate remark to Churchill indicated, it seemed only to precipitate a new crisis, with the further symbolic anguish that the destruction of a capital city involves. Had Hitler known how close to collapse the RAF was coming in that week, he would have allowed Goering to continue with his initial plan.

What was it like to be a Spitfire pilot in these critical few days? Almost all of those involved struggled to find words. They did not contemplate the larger strategic implications of what they were doing. If they read the papers, it was for ‘Jane’ in the
Daily Mirror.
They did not dwell on the deaths of their colleagues. Towards their own fate they cultivated a cocky indifference. They concentrated on the things of the moment: flying, tracer, drink, sleep, flying.

You would have slept in your uniform, a couple of hours in an armchair because you were too drunk to go to bed. If you were clever, like Hugh Dundas who flew at Douglas Bader’s elbow, you’d have remembered to turn your trousers inside out before you started drinking, so the beer stains weren’t visible the next day. Then you’d be in a drafty dispersal hut and the phone would ring. It might be the flight sergeant asking for a cup of tea or it might be operations telling you to scramble. Out on the grass the squadron doctor was ladling out his hangover cure from a tin pail. You ran over to the plane and in the grey light before dawn you could hear the soft, low purr of the Merlin engines warming up. The ground crew helped you on to the wing of the little Spitfire and then you were down in the tight cockpit, radio switched on, strapped up tight. The smell of petrol, oil and glycol coolant came in an unmistakable Spitfire cocktail. Once you had cleared the perimeter hedge and were up in the air, a long draught of oxygen would chase away the last traces of the night before.

At 20,000 feet you saw the sun heave up over the horizon, but the unpressurised cockpit was icy and the mud of the airfield had frozen your boots to the rudder bars. Then from the lightening sky you would see the dark flight of enemy bombers, in stepped formation, with fighter escorts. In theory the Hurricanes would take the bombers and the Spitfires would tackle the escorting Messerschmitts. In practice it seldom worked that way; within moments you were alone with only fourteen seconds’ worth of ammunition and the enemy wheeling all about you.

The Spitfire’s gunsights were synchronised to 200-250 yards, which wasn’t really close enough. The better pilots would chase in to 50 yards before firing. The firing button was on the control
column; you moved a switch from ‘safe’ to ‘fire’ and that was it: all eight guns went off together with the sound of tearing calico. The recommended burst lasted only two seconds, then you were powering down and away to the left, the forces of gravity pressing your organs against your bones.

The sight of English churches, roads and villages beneath your feet as you straightened up lent a protective edge to your concentration. The constantly visible German tracer that arced towards the thin perspex of your cockpit kept the nerves tight. As you climbed for another attack, you might see a German bomber in flames: it would hang for a moment, then drop from the formation, billowing black smoke. Beside it might be a stricken Spitfire, spiralling down, and you would watch as long as you dared for the blossoming of a parachute.

When your ammunition was used, you had to head back to the airfield. If you were short of fuel, it was usually possible to land at a nearer one: on a clear day you might be able to see as many as five. But it was still dark when you landed back at base; you had been airborne for less than an hour. As you staggered back to the dispersal hut you could watch the beginnings of your second sunrise. You thought of the men who had gone up with you who would never see another.

Two, three, four times a day in those crucial weeks the experience would be repeated. When it grew dark the German attacks finally stopped, and the Spitfire pilots went to the pub. In the numerous White Harts and Royal Oaks of southern England they ducked beneath the beams and pressed up to the bar. They chatted to the locals as casually as if they had stepped off the commuter train from Waterloo. Five shillings would keep them in beer until the local police saw diem out at closing time. There would be more drink back at one of the comfortable houses where they had been billeted around the airfield, and eventually a few hours’ sleep.

Pilots at the bases close to London might have a quick wash after the final sortie and motor up to town, where they liked to shock their more conventional army counterparts by appearing scruffily dressed at London restaurants and night clubs. They
knew that there had been a certain snobbery towards them and did nothing to ease the discomfort of those civilians who, having once called them Brylcreem Boys, were now belatedly trying to acknowledge them as heroes.

Hillary enjoyed the puzzlement in the faces of such people as they transparently searched the airmen’s faces for the qualities of heroism which had previously eluded them. They could not find what they were looking for; these men still seemed to them raffish and off-hand: how could they be the nation’s saviours? Their secret bravery and fragile indifference to death were sealed within the private slang of their mess.

Richard Hillary’s war was a short one. The Battle of Britain picked off its pilots with remorseless probability, and Hillary had only two more tales to tell before his own crash. After a flight with his squadron had broken up into dog-fights Hillary found himself once more alone. This time he successfully identified a squadron of Hurricanes and joined them as ‘Arse-end Charlie’, in which role he was supposed to weave around and protect them from attack in the rear. He was having a pleasant time until he noticed bullets appearing along his port wing. There was a tendency in such circumstances for a pilot to do nothing, but somehow to become mesmerised by what was happening. Hillary was able to react, however, by going down into a spin and trying to call up the Hurricanes to warn them off imminent attack. This was made impossible by the fact that his radio had been shot away. That seemed to be the only damage done, and he began to climb again to rejoin the Hurricanes. Then he noticed black smoke coming out of his engine and a smell of escaping glycol; he decided to go back to the station. When his windscreen became covered with oil he thought he had better put down at the nearer station of Lympne. That too became impossible as the engine began to lose power: the only course of action now was to crash-land in a field.