LITMIR.BIZ

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prisoner on 21 May. Nor was Paul Richey. On the last big day of fighting, 19 May, he had attacked a formation of Heinkels, and after destroying one was caught in return fire. He was hit in the neck by an armour-piercing bullet and temporarily paralysed, only regaining the power in his arms when his Hurricane was 2,000 feet up and locked in a vertical dive. He was found by the French and moved erratically westwards to end up in the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly.

      Billy Drake also passed through Paris after being collected from hospital in Chartres by an American girlfriend called Helen. Lacking uniform or identity papers, he was again taken for a German at a French roadblock and feared he was going to be shot as a spy until Helen persuaded them to let him go. They went to the Crillon, where she handed over her Buick, its tank miraculously full of petrol, and told him to head for Le Mans, where the British were regrouping. ‘The streets were crowded with refugees,’ he said, ‘and much worse, with soldiers without their rifles, just trudging. They’d had it. It was the most depressing thing I’ve seen in my life.’²⁷ At Le Mans there was an emotional reunion with the squadron members who had stayed behind.

      Richey, too, eventually joined them after recuperating in Paris, savouring the last days of freedom the city would know for four years. One day, walking down the Champs-Élysées, he came across Cobber Kain sitting at a pavement café with a Daily Express journalist, Noel Monks. Kain had chosen to help with the re-forming of 73 Squadron, after those who remained of the surviving pilots returned to England, and was due back himself in a few days. He was young enough to still have acne, but his spirit was frayed. Richey ‘noticed that he was nervous and preoccupied and kept breaking matches savagely in one hand while he glowered into the middle distance’.²⁸

      The following day Kain took off from the squadron base at Echemines, south-west of Paris, and started to perform rolls perilously close to the ground. Among those at the aerodrome was Sergeant Maurice Leng, a twenty-seven-year-old Londoner who was one of the first of the RAFVR pilots to be posted to a fighter unit to replace squadron casualties. ‘He’d taken off in…the last original surviving Hurricane of 73 Squadron with a fixed-pitch, two-bladed wooden airscrew,’ he said later. ‘He took off and came across the aerodrome, did a couple of flick rolls and hit the deck. That was it.’ The sympathy of the newcomers, who had hardly known him, was muted. ‘We all said, “How sad,” but we all said, “How stupid.”’²⁹

      The judgement could have served for the whole air campaign. It petered out in a series of withdrawals westwards in ever deepening chaos. Nos. 1 and 73 Squadrons, two of the first four squadrons in, were to be the last out, together with 501, which had been in France since the start of the blitzkrieg, and 242 and 17 Squadrons, which were sent out early in June. No. 1 Squadron was now transformed, with a new commander, Squadron Leader David Pemberton, and an almost entirely new set of pilots. Pat Hancock, one of the replacement pilots, remembered the remaining weeks as ‘only retreat, anxiety and lack of knowledge as to what was going on. Communications were almost non-existent. Fighter control, as such, had vanished.’³⁰ In the first two weeks of June the unit moved four times, in the end taking the initiative to shift itself when it was impossible to contact wing headquarters to obtain orders. They finally left on 17 June. One party departed by ship, boarding two dirty half-loaded colliers at La Rochelle. Another flew from St Nazaire. The squadron had been helping 73 and 242 Squadrons to maintain a continuous patrol over the port to cover the embarkation of the RAF and the remnants of the British army in France. They were unable to prevent the last tragedy of the campaign, the sinking of the Lancastria, which went down with the loss of 5,000 lives when a German bomb sailed flukily through an open hatch. Pat Hancock chased after one of the raiders ‘for a hell of a way, firing at it but with no success’. Circling over, he saw the victims struggling in the water and threw down his Mae West life-jacket.

      No. 17 Squadron was also sent to cover the evacuation, and set up base in tents on the racetrack at Le Mans on 8 June. The same day, Denis Wissler, back with 85 Squadron after a forty-eight-hour leave, was summoned by his commanding officer, Peter Townsend, who had taken over the squadron two weeks before, and told that ‘17 Squadron had wired and asked for two operational pilots and that he was very sorry but I would have to go, and that at once’. Wissler had only been with 85 Squadron for six weeks, but his first impression on joining was that ‘the mob seem damn nice’, and he had grown very fond of them. There were only two hours to say goodbye before he left for Kenley. He stopped on the way in London for a solitary, melancholy dinner at the Trocadero, where he ‘really got completely plastered and was put to bed by the wing commander’. The same kindly officer woke him up at 3.30 a.m. with some Alka-Seltzer, lent him his bath robe and sent him for a cold shower before he took off.

      Wissler left with Count Manfred Czernin, who had been with him in 85 Squadron. Czernin was twenty-seven, born in Berlin, where his Austrian diplomat father was en poste. His mother, though, was English, the daughter of Lord Grimthorpe, the polymath who designed Big Ben, and he had been to Oundle public school. There was none the less more than a dash of Mitteleuropa in his manner, which made him the object of some teasing. He joined the RAF in 1935 on a short-service commission after a stint farming tobacco in Rhodesia, and served as a bomber pilot before joining the reserve. Unlike Wissler, he had already been in action several times in France and claimed to have shot down four Germans. The pair managed to get lost several times on the way to Le Mans, taking twelve hours over a one-hour journey. The squadron then spent several days patrolling over Rouen and Le Havre, both towns obscured by columns of black smoke coiling up from burning oil tanks. On 12 June Wissler at last had his first taste of fighting when the squadron spotted three Heinkels bombing troopships off Le Havre and attacked. He opened fire on one of the bombers and saw smoke coming from the starboard engine, but modestly did not claim to have shot it down. Czernin, however, fired at another Heinkel in cloud and claimed a ‘conclusive casualty’. On a later patrol Wissler had another new and unwelcome experience: coming under heavy ground fire. ‘It was most terrifying,’ he reported candidly in his diary that evening.

      By now the evacuation was almost complete. The squadron returned to Le Mans after a patrol on the morning of Saturday, 12 June, to find the Naafi had gone leaving behind huge quantities of cigarettes and whisky, to which everyone helped themselves. The army had abandoned a batch of Harley-Davidson motor bikes. Pilots and ground staff took the opportunity to ride circuits round the famous track. The same day they moved to Dinard. On 17 June the pilots were at readiness all morning and broke off to eat at a local hotel. Members of a French squadron based at Dinard aerodrome were also there. Peter Dawbarn, a nineteen-year-old pilot officer with 17 Squadron, was among the English pilots who sat down to lunch. There was a radio in a corner of the dining room. When the news came on everyone stopped eating to listen. When the announcement of the capitulation followed there was silence. Then, ‘they all burst into tears’.³¹

      The newcomers had formed a low opinion of the French. Pilots’ attitudes towards their allies differed, depending on when they joined the battle. Many veterans of the phoney war had enjoyed the company of their spirited fellow officers in the neighbouring escadrilles, even if they had not found them particularly supportive or even visible during the crucial phase of the Battle of France. No. 1 Squadron had a much-loved Frenchman attached to it as interpreter, Jean ‘Moses’ Demozay, who was to escape to Britain in an abandoned Bristol Bombay troop carrier and fight bravely and effectively for the RAF and the Free French for the rest of the war. The reinforcement flights and squadrons rarely saw the French. The few recorded encounters were not happy ones. Flight Lieutenant Fred Rosier of 229 Squadron put down at an airfield near Lille, after being nearly shot down in a battle, ‘to find the French were there, with brand-new American aeroplanes, fighters, and they were not flying. They were quite friendly, but I was livid…They were not participating in the battle at all.’³²

      The French the replacement pilots saw appeared demoralized and apathetic. Peter Dawbarn and the 17 Squadron pilots had come across French fighter pilots on

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