LITMIR.BIZ

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at the satellite stations could be miserable. The members of 32 Squadron, pilots and ground crew, had to move to Gravesend while Biggin Hill was temporarily closed so deep shelters could be dug and a concrete runway laid – part of a nationwide programme to replace the now embarrassingly anachronistic grass fields with all-weather surfaces. The squadron diarist recorded that ‘the wretched troops lived in the utmost discomfort, sleeping on palliases on the floor and being fed from a cooking trailer…the NCOs also slept on the floor, and the less lucky of the officers.’

      Great ingenuity was used in the pursuit of fun. When the well-connected sportsmen of 601 Auxiliary Squadron found themselves based briefly at Hornchurch around Christmas, the commanding officer, Max Aitken, son of the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, used his show-business contacts to arrange for the cast of the Windmill Theatre to visit. The men loved the demure striptease for which the Windmill girls were famous. Several members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the ‘Waafs’, who were now being posted to RAF stations around the country, walked out in protest, however.

      For most pilots, though, life was spartan and uncertain, especially for the newcomers and those finishing their training. In letters home they recounted their daily routines, successes and setbacks in a tone of jaunty confidence that seemed designed to calm the fears of anxious mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Occasionally, though, a note of doubt or worry breaks through the surface of imperturbability, a reminder that behind the bravado were innocent young men, barely out of adolescence, green, apprehensive and homesick. Paddy Finucane, then at No. 8 Flying Training School at RAF Montrose, still sounds like a schoolboy in a letter to his younger brother, Kevin. ‘How did you like Robin Hood! I saw it in London when I was at Uxbridge. It was on at the local fleapit and I enjoyed it immensely. The part I liked was when old Guy of Gisborne got a good twelve inches of cold steel in the bread basket. The fighting and shooting scenes were very good…’¹¹

      Noel Benson sent long, regular letters to his mother and doctor father at their house at Great Ouseburn, near York, throughout the winter of 1939 and 1940, detailing his progress. He had gone to Cranwell as a flight cadet in April 1938 after leaving Sedbergh public school. At the end of November 1939 he was with 145 Squadron at Redhill and Croydon and writing home to complain that the letters ‘daddy’ sends are not long enough. His main concern is the stinginess of the authorities in allocating petrol coupons, which may prevent him from getting home for leave. He seems to have spent much of his spare time quietly, visiting family and friends in the area for lunch and supper, dutifully negotiating the blackout to give lifts home to other guests. The news from the squadron was mostly domestic. A brother pilot was getting married and he would like to give him a dog as a present. A bitch in the Benson household had recently littered. Could they send photos of the pups so he can pick one out? Occasionally he vented his frustration at the inaction of the phoney war. One of his acquaintances was ‘one of the lucky ones’, who had been posted to one of the four fighter squadrons sent to France. On 11 December he was ‘pretty fed up because there is absolutely nothing doing here. But the big bugs do such damn stupid things at times that it is enough to make anyone wild and fed up. If I try and say any more I shall probably choke with rage!!!’

      Eleven days later he had been posted to 603 Squadron, now at Prestwick near Glasgow, and was ‘busy from the word go. I started flying immediately which suited me fine.’ At the end of the month he reported that he was ‘having a very busy time here but like it very much. I am “on” from dawn to dusk, so you see I have not much free time. I am afraid there is no hope whatsoever of any leave for the next month or so.’

      On the first day of the New Year, Benson was trained up and took his place as a fully operational member of the squadron. He found his comrades ‘a very decent crowd’, and liked the fact that, despite an influx of outsiders, the unit was still mostly composed of the pre-war amateurs. ‘Being an auxiliary squadron they [all] had jobs before the war and this was really their hobby. So there is a lot of red tape brushed aside. The regulars in the squadron are quite often horrified at the irregular things that they do but I must say they get the job done.’

      The squadron routine meant that time off was scarce. After three weeks’ continual duty, he went with a friend to Glasgow, where they could ‘hardly see a thing because just outside the city we ran into the smoke fog that hangs over the place, and although it was mid afternoon it looked like dusk. Everyone seemed to have long faces and I don’t blame them if they are always in that muck.’ There is no mention of girlfriends or even women. The boyish note, the thank-yous to uncle Reg for a cardigan and unknown donors for mittens to combat the hellish cold, gradually fades, edged out by a mounting confidence. For his birthday, he announced, he would like a car badge, ‘in the form of a Spitfire. It must be a Spitfire, no other type will do.’ On 8 February he reported ‘we chased away another Hitlerite today, two in fact, but they nipped into the clouds before we got a smack at them’. Early in March he once again expressed his frustration, this time because the auxiliaries of 602 Squadron were seeing more action than his own unit. ‘There is a good deal of friendly rivalry between us,’ he wrote. ‘We are rather annoyed because we have not seen any fun lately while this other squadron has been having all the fun.’¹² This fretting at not being in the thick of things earned him the nickname ‘Broody’, the commanding officer of 603 told Benson’s father later, in a letter, ‘because he was always so despondent if, for any reason, he was not allowed to fly’. He also ‘had a habit of pondering over the many problems confronting him’.¹³

      Noel Benson sounds from his letters to have been what was known as a ‘keen type’. To be identified as such won a pilot official approval, but it invited mild, affectionate scorn from comrades who considered conspicuous effort to be slightly embarrassing. The truth was that almost everyone was keen. They were just reluctant to appear so.

      Denis Wissler seems to have conformed more to the social norm. He was intelligent and warm-hearted to the point of vulnerability. His father was of Swiss origin, and came from the family that invented Marmite, whose London headquarters he ran. Denis joined the RAF on a short-service commission in July 1939 after leaving Bedford School, alma mater of a number of Fighter Command pilots. In January 1940, aged nineteen, he was in the middle of advanced training at 15 Flying Training School Lossiemouth, in the far north of Scotland. Wissler kept a journal, each evening recording the day’s events, no matter how tired he was or how much beer had been taken, in a small red leather Lett’s diary. It is a lively account: of days flying and fighting and evenings drinking, of flirtation burgeoning into romance. Sounding through it all is one dominant and recurring theme: his desire to succeed as a pilot and be worthy of the Fighter Boy camaraderie that he, like so many, felt with the force of love.

      He began the course on 1 January, flying in the morning and ‘feeling perfectly fit and quite at home in the air’. On 3 January he spent the day working on perfecting his rolls – the manoeuvre of rotating while flying straight and level. ‘I did two and they were grand,’ he recorded with satisfaction. ‘I even gained height in the second.’ Two days later he felt he ‘had them taped now. My two best efforts were a roll at 1,000 feet then three rolls in succession’. The following week he had a flying test in which he was put through ‘(1) a spin (2) a slow roll (3) a loop (3) [sic] steep turns both ways to left and right (4) a forced landing (5) low flying (6) slow low flying (7) and naturally a take-off and landing. The instructor said that it was quite good, but that my steep turns were split-arse (ragged and wild).’ After a few days without flying, partly it seems because of restrictions imposed by the instructors, he was in the air again, but noted disconsolately that he ‘flew very badly today, heavens knows why because I really felt on top of the world and was looking forward to flying again, but somehow it didn’t just connect’. Despite the off days, Wissler was a good pilot. At one point he writes that he was asked if he would like to go on an armament course, which would mean rapid promotion and the chance of a permanent commission, but as it entailed a long course of lectures and exams and little or no flying, ‘I said NO.’

      The prospect of dying pointlessly, crashing into a hillside or misjudging a landing, was always present. On his second day he came back late from a session

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