LITMIR.BIZ

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the port engine. They were joined by another section from the squadron, who added to the fusillade battering the Junkers. ‘He was responding with all his armaments; tracers were shooting past me, and I got a glimpse of a gunner behind twin guns,’ one of the pilots, Patsy Gifford, said after the action. ‘We went in again and gave him some more and I saw he was hit forward. Bits of fabric were dropping off and I thought I saw a red glow inside the fuselage.’⁷ The Junkers hit the sea with bullets from the Spitfires stitching the water. The surviving three from the four-man crew were picked up by a trawler.

      Another Ju 88 was shot down by 602 Squadron, also crashing into the sea. In both cases several pilots had been involved in their destruction. The official account recorded that this had been a team effort, but it singled out Gifford and two 602 pilots, George Pinkerton and Archie McKellar, for special mention. They were identified not by name but by pre-war profession. The squadrons involved were auxiliaries. Gifford, like several others in 603 Squadron, was a solicitor; he spent his weekends driving a Frazer-Nash car very fast, shooting, fencing, taking out girls and flying. Pinkerton was thirty years old, and had left his wife, six-month-old daughter and fruit farm in Renfrewshire behind after the squadron was called up. McKellar was twenty-seven, short, aggressive and fit, and worked in his father’s plastering business before joining the squadron full time. Gifford was to be killed the following spring, McKellar in the autumn.

      The image they presented of social cohesion, of ordinary men from different walks of life coming together in the defence of their country, was naturally appealing to official propagandists. The fact that it was the amateurs of the auxiliary air force who had drawn first blood was given the maximum emphasis. ‘Saturday Afternoon Airmen Shoot Nazi Bombers Down’, was the headline in the Daily Express.

      In other respects the Rosyth raid gave little reason for satisfaction. The fighters had not been able to prevent one of the raiders dropping an opportunistic bomb on a destroyer, HMS Mohawk, entering the Firth of Forth as the Luftwaffe was leaving, killing sixteen members of the crew, including the captain. Once again, the warning system had failed. Intelligence reports had predicted an attack, but from ten o’clock on the morning of the raid the local radar station was ineffective, due either to a power failure or a faulty valve. No sirens were sounded to alert the civilian population (though they were activated at military bases). Despite the rejoicing at the downing of two German bombers, the first raiders to be shot down, the Luftwaffe got off very lightly, given the superior speed and firepower of the attackers. That ten escaped was partly owing to the fact that the Spitfire pilots were under orders to go no closer than 400 yards, which was thought to be the most effective range for the Brownings. The pilots immediately recognized that getting in closer would produce more devastating results.

      The bomber crews also benefited from a certain caution on the part of the defenders. When Hector MacLean, who had been training to be a solicitor in a Glasgow legal office before moving to Drem with 602 Squadron, was scrambled he ‘couldn’t believe it wasn’t another mess-up because we’d been ordered off so often to intercept things and it had been a Blenheim or an Anson or something like that’. Spotting a bomber, he ‘followed it gingerly thinking…I must not shoot one of our own fellas down, but there were the crosses so finally I had a go.’ Having emptied his ammunition, he hurried back to rearm in preparation for a second wave that never came. Until the squadron moved south in August the following year, the only Germans he saw were ‘mainly single aircraft sneaking over to take pictures and drop the odd bomb and attack convoys off the coast. It was easy to do. They could nip in, drop a few bombs around the boats and get out before we could get at them.’⁸

      The same pattern of frustration and boredom settled over all the fighter squadrons in England and Scotland. Pilots spent their days at readiness, being ordered airborne to check out incursions by unidentified aircraft, ‘X’ raids as they were known, that almost always turned out to be friendly or else were too far off to intercept. Then there were the dreary convoy patrols, flying in circles over ships that were rarely attacked. There were occasional brushes with the enemy. On 20 November, 74 Squadron at Hornchurch recorded its first success when three pilots fastened on to a Heinkel 111 heavy bomber and shot it down over the Thames estuary. The following day two Hurricanes from 79 Squadron at Biggin Hill were patrolling over the south coast when they were ordered to investigate a radar sighting that turned out to be a Dornier 17 medium bomber on a weather reconnaissance. They found it, descended on it, opened fire and watched it explode as it hit the Channel.

      On 3 February Peter Townsend took part in the destruction of the first German bomber to be shot down on British soil since the First World War, after 43 Squadron had exchanged bucolic Tangmere for the bleak surroundings of Acklington, high up on the north-east coast near Newcastle. He was leading his section on patrol over the sea, keeping at wave level to surprise any German aircraft, which tended to hug the clouds, when he saw a Heinkel. The crew saw nothing ‘until the bullets began tearing into their bomber. Only then did red tracer come spurting from their rear guns, but, in the first foolish rapture of combat, I believed myself…invulnerable.’ The Heinkel staggered over the cliffs at Whitby and crash-landed in snow behind the town. Townsend felt elated at the success – then, on hearing there were two survivors, a touch of remorse. He visited them in hospital. Then he returned to the mess to drink champagne. It was, he thought later, ‘a horribly uncivilized way of behaving, really, when you have just killed someone. But an enemy bomber down was proof of our prowess, and that was a legitimate pretext for celebration. For the enemy crew, whom we had shot to pieces, we gave no thought. Young, like us, they had existed, but existed no longer. Deep down we knew, but dared not admit, that we had little hope of existing much longer ourselves. So, meanwhile, we made merry.’⁹

      Death was more likely to come through accident than enemy action that winter. The need to have fighters on permanent standby around the clock meant that pilots were called on to do an increased amount of night flying, a skill to which insufficient attention had been paid before the war. George Bennions, now with 41 Squadron at Catterick, found it was ‘automatically assumed that they would just send you off at night and there would be no problem’. The Spitfires they were flying were notoriously difficult to operate in a darkness which had deepened considerably with the introduction of the blackout. ‘The long nose blotted everything out straight in front of you, and because the engine had very short stubs, all that you saw…was a great moustache of flame…The only thing you could do was to tuck your head back into the cockpit and take off on the instruments, which was all right for a trained pilot, but for new pilots who hadn’t done any night flying, or very little, it must have been terrible.’

      A Canadian pilot, Pilot Officer Overall, took off one night, circled round and flew straight into a house. Bennions protested at the stupidity of sending off pilots in pitch darkness without allowing them to first get familiarized in conditions of bright moonlight. A senior officer accused him of being afraid. His suggestion, though, was eventually adopted.¹⁰

      Even the most skilful pilots found themselves in difficulties, especially when sensory deprivation was combined with incompetence on the part of those directing them on the ground. Al Deere nearly got killed while being guided back after a night patrol in total darkness by the Hornchurch controller, who vectored him straight into a clump of barrage balloons. It was no wonder that so many pilots hated and feared night flying.

      The winter of 1939 is frozen in the memory of those who lived through it as the bitterest they ever endured. On many mornings, snow had to be shovelled off the aprons and runways and the Merlin engines of the fighters thawed out and run up before any flying could take place. The aircraft were often covered in a crust of ice and had to be scrubbed down with wire-bristle brooms. At Drem, the ‘coldest spot on earth’, the pilots sat in poorly insulated dispersal huts, clustered around a lukewarm stove, playing ‘uckers’ – a form of ludo – and waiting for the phone to ring. Very soon everyone could distinguish the tone of the ‘ops’ phone, announcing a scramble, from that of the ‘admin’ line. The bad weather would continue to make flying and life in general difficult well into the spring.

      Conditions

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