LITMIR.BIZ

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have stirred memories for Cecil Lewis.

      The winter was as cruel in northern France as in Britain. For weeks at a time snow and blanketing cloud made flying impossible. The ground was iron hard, wrecking the tail wheels of the Hurricanes as they taxied out to take-off or touched down after a patrol. The squadron worked hard whenever circumstances allowed. Sightings of enemy aircraft were occasional and usually inconclusive. The pilots found they could not climb quickly enough to reach the high-flying reconnaissance aircraft as they crawled tantalizingly across the sky 20,000 feet overhead. One problem was that their Hurricanes were fitted with early two-bladed wooden propellers. The pitch of the airscrew could not be varied to improve acceleration and achieve the optimum rate of climb the engines were capable of delivering. The problem was solved when the first machine with a three-bladed constant-speed airscrew, which automatically adjusted to the rate of revs to get the best results, was delivered in April 1940. Halahan was the first to fly it, followed by the more experienced pilots, all of whom, the squadron log recorded, ‘were greatly pleased by its superior performance’. From then on the old Hurricanes were gradually replaced by the new models, but some pilots were still flying with wooden propellers when the fighting began in earnest.

      In March the weather began to improve slightly and patrolling became more intense. Two new pilots arrived at the squadron, Pilot Officer Robert Shaw and Flying Officer Harold Salmon. Shaw, from Bolton, had been one of the first to join the RAFVR and had only been called up to full-time duty at the outbreak of war. Salmon had learned to fly with the RAF in 1933 and was summoned from the reserve in September 1939. Both had done conversion courses to Hurricanes before being posted to France. Halahan was not impressed by their preparations. The record book noted: ‘It is observed that new pilots sent out from England are insufficiently trained and [sic] too few hours on type to be familiar with its limitations. They also appear to have had little or no practice on R/T [radio telephony] and to have never used oxygen. It means time taken off from squadron duties to give these pilots the necessary training for active service, and also adds to the precious aircraft hours to allow them to do non-operational flying.’ Both men were to remain with the squadron throughout the summer, with Salmon claiming an Me 110 and a probable Me 109. Shaw was less successful. In his brief life as a fighter pilot he shot nothing down. He was himself attacked by a British fighter over the Sussex coast in August and forced to land. On 3 September he failed to return from a patrol and was reported missing, one of the many unremarked young pilots among Fighter Command’s dead that year.

      The pilots of 73 Squadron had seen more action than those of 1 Squadron. This was due partly to their closer proximity to the frontier, partly to a more aggressive approach that sometimes took pilots scores of miles over the German lines in defiance of standing orders. The most willing to take risks was Flying Officer Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain, a twenty-one-year-old New Zealander who had first attracted attention when he entertained the crowds at the 1938 Empire Air Day show with a particularly daring aerobatic display. In November 1939 he destroyed two Dorniers and in January 1940 won a DFC. Kain was regarded by his peers as a ‘split-arse pilot’, a term that mixed approval with concern, and his approach bordered on recklessness.

      Kain soon became known to British newspaper readers through the efforts of correspondents based at Reims, who, after he had shot down five enemy aircraft by the end of March, proclaimed him the first ‘ace’ of the war. Halahan disliked this development, as did others further up the RAF chain of command. Halahan preached caution, feeling there was no point in risking precious lives and machines before the real battle started. No. 1 Squadron seldom crossed the frontier. When it did it was at high altitude, turning back in a sweep to draw any German fighters out. Halahan was also strongly against publicizing the acts of single pilots, believing it undermined squadron spirit, and he banned newspaper reporters from the base. The Air Ministry had initially seemed to welcome publicity, sending four experienced journalists to act as press officers to France, but it was soon in conflict with the special correspondents. Despite the eagerness of the hacks to produce patriotic material, officials fretted about security and imposed heavy censorship that resulted in dispatches being slashed and rewritten out of recognition. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, the commander of the British Air Forces in France, also shared the view that creating ‘aces’ was bad for the morale of ordinary squadron members. When Barratt forbade interviews with pilots and ordered that all information must be filtered through service press offices, news organizations sulked and finally withdrew their men from France.

      But the newspapers had recognized that Fighter Command, whose purpose and character were still known only vaguely to the British public, was a rich potential source of stirring copy and were bent on their myth-making mission. In an aggrieved article complaining about restrictions, the Daily Express correspondent, O. D. Gallagher, wrote: ‘The young men of the RAF who have not yet spread their wings in wartime need their heroes. They’re entitled to them, and whatever the policy-makers may say on this score, they’re going to have them.’ So it came to pass, but at a time when authority had decided that the propaganda benefits of publicizing fighter pilots overwhelmed all other considerations.⁷

      The long-awaited encounter with the Messerschmitts came, finally, at the beginning of March. Cobber Kain had the first success, downing an Me 109 on 2 March over the German lines near Saarbrucken. His aircraft was badly shot up in the fight and he was forced to crash-land near Metz. His attacker was probably Oberleutnant Werner Molders, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who was himself in the process of acquiring the status of an ace. Kain’s standing, and his at this stage rare first-hand experience of the Luftwaffe’s machines, pilots and tactics, persuaded the authorities to bring him back temporarily to Britain to lecture to pilots in training. Christopher Foxley-Norris, by then preparing to join an army cooperation squadron equipped with lethally slow Lysanders, was present when Kain gave a talk on fighter evasion. ‘At the end, somebody got up at the back and said, “You’ve told us how to evade one fighter, sir. What happens if you meet two?” To which the answer was, “Oh, most unlikely. They haven’t got many aircraft and they’re very short of fuel.”’ The next time Foxley-Norris saw the questioner he was ‘being chased around a church steeple by six 109s’.⁸

      The Me 109 was to turn out to be the most feared aeroplane in the Luftwaffe’s line-up but that was not how it seemed in the spring of 1940. The attention of everyone in the RAF was equally focussed on by the twin-engined Me 110s, which had been designed with the dual roles of clearing the way for the Luftwaffe bomber fleets and attacking incoming enemy bombing raids. The aircraft’s boastful nickname, Zerstörer (Destroyer), and its nominal top speed of nearly 350 m.p.h. at 21,500 feet – the same as a Spitfire and slightly faster than a Hurricane – made it the subject of apprehensive fascination. Air Marshal Barratt even offered dinner in Paris to the first pilot to shoot one down.

      The distinction fell, collectively, to three No. 1 Squadron pilots, who between them on 29 March destroyed three Me 110s. Johnny Walker, Bill Stratton and Taffy Clowes were ordered up in the early afternoon to patrol over Metz at 25,000 feet. Half an hour after taking off they spotted nine Me 110s cruising unconcernedly in sections of three in line astern, east of the city. Once attacked, according to the squadron record, the German machines ‘proved very manoeuvrable, doing half-rolls and diving out, coming up in stall turns’. The ensuing dogfight followed the inexorable physical rules of such engagements, with the advantage shifting from attacker to attacked and back again as they followed each other’s tails in a downward spiral that in no time brought the mêlée to a bare 2,000 feet. Walker and Stratton ran out of ammunition and returned to Vassincourt, believing they had crippled one machine, the wreckage of which was later found. Clowes meanwhile had disposed of two. After hearing their accounts, the consensus was that the Me 110s were not as fearsome as their name suggested. The record concluded: ‘As a result of this combat it may be stated that the Me 110, although very fast and manoeuvrable for a twin-engined aircraft, can easily be outmanoeuvred by a Hurricane.’ The pilots also reported that ‘it appeared that the rear gunner was incapable of returning fire whilst [the] Me 110 was in combat because of the steep turns “blacking him out” or making him too uncomfortable to take proper aim.’ Barratt kept his promise. Two days later he sent his personal aircraft to whisk the three to Paris for dinner

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