Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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had heard rumours of a crash and assumed ‘I was a fried piece of meat…everyone was saying “poor old Wissler”’. A week later a pupil and instructor were killed after their aeroplane ‘hit something, what, we don’t know yet but it brought the plane down’.
Lossiemouth was an isolated spot, stranded on the chilly extremities of the Morayshire coast, but there were cinemas and pubs a few miles away in Elgin. Given the town’s isolation, there seems to have been a variety of films to see. On 19 January Wissler and his friend ‘Wootty’ – Ernest Wootten, another short-service entrant – saw The Ghost Goes West, which he judged a ‘grand film and really comes up to what everyone says about it’. In the next nine days he took in Wuthering Heights, Jesse James, The Four Feathers and The Lion Has Wings, a stirring story featuring Bomber and Fighter Command based on the raid on German warships in North Sea harbours at the beginning of the war, directed by Alexander Korda and starring Ralph Richardson. Sequences of it had been shot at Hornchurch using ‘B’ Flight of 74 Squadron the day after Barking Creek. The hard work in the air was supplemented by hearty drinking. On 2 February he wrote, ‘we did no flying today as the weather wasn’t good enough…In fact I did nothing until the evening when Wootty and I went out to the “Beach Bar” and met Sergeant Harman, one of the instructors in my flight, and I really got more drunk than ever before, so badly that I couldn’t even stand.’
Despite the overall cheeriness that emanates from the faded ink, sometimes his mood faltered and dejection crept in. On 8 February he went down with German measles (‘most unpatriotic’), came up in spots and was confined to bed. Four days later he was allowed out. ‘I got up and walked down to flights. Wootty wasn’t doing anything so he and I walked into Lossiemouth where I posted a letter home and bought a magazine to help while away the time this evening. Our dinner was quite uneatable tonight. Oh God what a hole this is and how glad I shall be to go.’
He was, it is clear, painfully homesick. The laborious procedures and long delays involved in making a trunk call, made worst by wartime restrictions, never deterred him from ringing home. After a night drinking strong ale mixed with draught bitter he none the less remembered his parents were waiting to hear from him and, after a lengthy wait for a line, ‘carried on a small conversation. I could never have forgiven myself if I had missed one word Mummy or Pop had said.’
On Friday, 16 February, he and the rest of his class were given a leaving dinner in the mess and got appropriately drunk. The following day he learned he was going to St Athans in Wales to finish his training. He wrote the news in his diary on the train home to ten days’ leave in wobbly writing, registering his delight. It meant that he was ‘on fighters’.
It took several more weeks and another move to the operational training unit at Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire before he finally took the controls of the aeroplane that would carry him through the rest of his war. ‘I at last went solo in a “Hurricane”,’ he wrote on Wednesday, 20 March, ‘and did five landings in fifty minutes. It is a grand aeroplane and not so very difficult…I can now wear the top button of my tunic undone, as is done by all people who fly fighters.’14
The remainder of Wissler’s time at Sutton Bridge was spent on Harvards and Hurricanes, frequently practising the disciplined formation manoeuvres that were still considered to be the best training for air flying. In the evening there was snooker and darts in the mess or at the Bridge, a local hotel. The war was moving closer. At the end of March a request was made for volunteers to go to France to replace casualties in the four fighter squadrons based there. Wissler put his name forward, then reconsidered after worrying about the effect such a move would have on his parents.
At the end of April there was another flap when it appeared that one of the pilots was being posted to Norway. His order to move was cancelled at the last minute. It was a small example of the chaos surrounding an enterprise that was ill-organized and amateurish from start to finish. Dowding had been asked to provide fighter cover for an expedition to secure the iron-ore fields of northern Sweden and provide help for the Finns, who had been showing unexpectedly strong resistance to the Russian invaders in their ‘Winter War’. Following the capitulation of the Finns to Moscow in March, the Germans had taken the opportunity on 9 April to seize ports and airfields in Norway as bases for an escalated war against Britain and the objective changed. The force was now charged with seizing them back and 263 Squadron was assigned to help them. The squadron had only been reformed six months previously and was equipped with Gladiators, which now had the look of museum pieces. It was facing 500 Luftwaffe combat aircraft, including 330 bombers. The pilots arrived near Trondheim on the evening of 24 April, having flown in from the aircraft carrier Glorious. Their base was to be on the ice of Lake Lesjaskog. The following morning the wheels of all the machines were frozen to the ice, the controls locked solid, and it was impossible to start the engines. To compound a hopeless situation, supplies supposed to have been waiting at a nearby port failed to arrive so there was no mobile radar, only two light guns for airfield defence and no petrol bowser or acid for the accumulators in the starter trolleys used to fire up the engines.
In the end these deficiencies were academic. The base was attacked by Heinkel 111s, which swept over, bombing and machine-gunning the Gladiators as they sat glued to the ice. The already demoralized ground crews, many of whom were new to the squadron, ran for the cover of the surrounding forest. By the end of the first day the squadron was reduced to five serviceable aircraft. By the end of the second day there were three, and on the third there were none. The squadron was withdrawn to re-form and re-equip. On 22 May it was back in Norway with its Gladiators as part of the force trying to capture Narvik, where it was joined by 46 Squadron, equipped with Hurricanes. This time it managed to operate on twelve days, flying 389 sorties and claiming to have shot down twenty-six enemy aircraft.
No. 46 Squadron also flew on twelve days and claimed eleven aircraft destroyed. It arrived in Norway from the Glorious, but had to return to Scapa Flow when the first airfield selected, near Harstad, turned out to be unusable. On their return they had to abandon a second base at Skaanland after two Hurricanes, including one flown by Squadron Leader Cross, ploughed into the soft ground and went tail-up, and the rest of the squadron was diverted to Bardufoss, sixty miles to the north. Flight Sergeant Richard Earp, who had gone to Halton from his Warrington grammar school before being selected for flying training, managed to land safely. He remembered Skaanland as ‘nothing but a strip by a fjord. The troops had been working very hard out there and they’d covered the place with coconut matting and wire netting. Poor Cross came along to land on it and it just rolled up in front of his wheels.’15 They washed in melted snow and lived six to a tent. ‘All I had was a groundsheet and two blankets. You couldn’t sleep. It was daylight all the time. It was terribly bloody cold.’ As the decision was taken to abandon the campaign, the squadron was withdrawn.
Earp left on a fishing boat and was picked up by a destroyer that took him back to Scotland. When he returned to the base at Digby he found that ‘there was hardly any of the rest of the squadron left’. On 7 June ten exhausted pilots of 46 Squadron managed to land their Hurricanes on the Glorious, despite the absence of arrester hooks, supposedly an impossible feat. No. 263 Squadron was already embarked. On the way back the carrier was sighted by the battlecruiser Scharnhorst, which opened fire at long range. The second salvo smashed into the ship, setting it ablaze. It sank within an hour, taking with it 1,474 officers and men of the Royal Navy and 41 members of the RAF, including all but two of the pilots. It was the final disaster in a doomed campaign. From the cold perspective of Fighter Command, it was also a terrible waste of men and machines which would be badly needed in the months ahead.
In Britain the Fighter Boys waited for the real battle to begin. Across the Channel a handful of pilots were getting a foretaste of what lay ahead. When, in September 1939, the British Expeditionary Force was sent to France, the air force inevitably went too. Four fighter squadrons were sent in the first week of the war to support the army and protect a small fleet