Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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in the year. Dowding none the less protested, claiming he had been promised that no fighters would be sent until ‘the safety of the Home Base had been assured’. His fear, justified as it was to turn out, was that once the war started in France, the RAF would be committed to providing more and more aircraft and pilots to fight someone else’s battle, leaving the country’s air defences fatally weakened when the Germans moved on to attack Britain.
The squadrons flew off to bases that would have been familiar to their RFC predecessors. Their daily patrols took them over shell-ploughed earth, splintered forests and shattered villages that were only just recovering from four years under the hammer of war. No. 1 Squadron arrived in high spirits in Le Havre, flying low over the town in a display of exuberance that impressed both the locals and the Americans crowding the port in search of a passage home. They spent their first night in a requisitioned convent, and their first evening drinking in the Guillaume Tell, the Normandie, the Grosse Tonne and La Lune. The latter was a brothel where the carousing could go on until dawn. The following day they blew away their hangovers with a choreographed ‘beat up’ of the town, looping and rolling in tight formation at rooftop height. While waiting to move to their forward base, the pilots spent the non-flying hours of the day playing football and writing letters home, and the evenings cruising the boulevards. ‘We all felt that our first taste of service in France would probably be our last of civilization and peace for a long time and we wanted to make the best of it,’ wrote Paul Richey, who had joined the squadron six months earlier. He took the opportunity to make his peace with God. The old cure at the church of St Michel heard his confession, ‘giving me the strength and courage to face whatever was to come’.1
The No. 1 pilots had a rich variety of temperaments and backgrounds, typical of the established squadrons going into the war. The unit had served on the Western Front from 1915 and got through the interwar years without suffering disbandment or amalgamation. Its leader was P. J. H. ‘Bull’ Halahan, whose Irish father had been an RFC pilot. His flight commanders were Peter ‘Johnny’ Walker from Suffolk, a member of the unit’s acrobatic team at the 1937 Hendon Air Pageant; and Peter Prosser Hanks from York, who had been with the squadron since September 1936. There was an American, Cyril Palmer, known as ‘Pussy’; a Canadian, Mark ‘Hilly’ Brown; an Australian, Leslie Clisby, who had been an RAAF cadet, and a New Zealander, Bill Stratton. There was also an Irishman, John Ignatius Kilmartin. ‘Killy’ was a romantic figure with black wavy hair and chiselled good looks who had been born in Dundalk in 1913, one of eight children of a forester. His father died when he was nine and he was dispatched to Australia under a scheme for orphans known as ‘Big Brother’. As soon as he was old enough to work, he was sent to a cattle station in New South Wales, where he lived for five years. He moved on to Shanghai, where he had an aunt, and got a job as a clerk in the Shanghai gasworks. In his spare time he rode as a jockey for Sir Victor Sassoon. Seeing an advertisement offering short-service commissions, he applied, was summoned for an interview and made his way to London via the Trans-Siberian Railway in company with a group of Sumo wrestlers heading for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
There were four sergeant pilots: Arthur ‘Taffy’ Clowes and Fred Berry, both of whom had begun their careers as aircraft apprentices in 1929 and volunteered for pilot training, and Frank Soper and Rennie Albonico. The best-known member of the squadron was to be Paul Richey, whose Fighter Pilot, based on his diaries and published in 1941, was one of the best books ever written about the experience and ethos of air fighting, and still rings with unalloyed authenticity. Richey was educated at the Institut Fisher in Switzerland and at Downside. He was intelligent and amusing and a good linguist. He was also tall, blond and strikingly good-looking. Cuthbert Orde, who had been a pilot in the RFC before he became a war artist, found him at first ‘rather quiet, shy and serious minded’, while acknowledging his enthusiasm for a party. Richey’s comparative sophistication disguised a strong humanitarian streak and an unusual ability to analyse his feelings. He sympathized with the victims of the war, whoever they might be. It was a quality he shared with Billy Drake, another middle-class Catholic boy in 1 Squadron who displayed a marked sense of decency.
By the middle of October, after several moves, the squadron settled down at an airfield near Vassincourt, perched above a canal and a railway line amid lush and watery cow pastures near Bar-le-Duc where Champagne meets Lorraine. No. 73 Squadron was based not far away at Rouvres, on the drab Woevre plain, east of the heights of Verdun. Their duties were to protect the Advanced Air Striking Force, deployed around Reims and made up of Fairey Battle and Blenheim light bombers in support of the French army holding the Maginot Line along the Franco-German frontier.
To the north were 85 and 87 Squadrons, equipped with Hurricanes, who formed the fighter element of the air component of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). They were joined on 15 November by two auxiliary squadrons, 607 (County of Durham) and 615 (County of Surrey), in response to persistent demands from the French government for British forces in France to be strengthened. They would have to make do with their Gladiators until Hurricanes arrived. The Hurricanes’ wide undercarriage made them less likely to come to grief on the rough grass airfields of northern France than the Spitfire with its narrower wheelbase. There was also a strategic reason for the decision not to send Spitfires. Dowding’s vision of a French campaign turning into an unstoppable drain on resources had made him determined not to risk his most valuable weapon in the enterprise.
The pilots of 1 Squadron were billeted in Neuville, a few miles from the airfield, a village accustomed to being washed by the tides of war, having been twice occupied by the Germans, in 1871 and 1914. The squadron flew patrols whenever the poor weather permitted. On a clear day the view from the cockpit was sublime, with the Rhine winding in the distance, beyond it the Black Forest, and way off, glittering on the far horizon, the white battlements of the Swiss Alps. As in Britain, friends were at first to prove more dangerous than enemies. Richey, mistaken for a German, was attacked by two French pilots in Morane-Saulniers, the relatively slow and underarmed standard fighter of the Armée de l’Air. Fortunately his Hurricane’s superior performance allowed him to shake them off.
On the afternoon of 30 October 1939, a gloriously sunny day, the unfamiliar drone of bombers was heard high over the airfield, sending the pilots scrambling to get airborne and give chase. Ten miles west of Toul, Pilot Officer Peter ‘Boy’ Mould, an ex-Cranwell cadet who joined the squadron in June, caught up with a Dornier 17 cruising along at 18,000 feet. Mould approached from behind, hosing the bomber nose to tail with his Brownings. The Dornier, according to the squadron operations record book, ‘appeared to have been taken by surprise as no evasive tactics were employed and no fire was encountered by PO Mould’. It caught fire immediately, plunged into a vertical dive and exploded into the French countryside. The only discernible remnants of the crew of four were five hands recovered from the wreckage, along with a mangled gun and an oxygen bottle with a bullet hole in it, which were taken off to the mess as trophies in an echo of old RFC practices. The human debris was buried with full military honours but Mould felt bad about his victory, getting very drunk that night and telling Richey: ‘I’m bloody sorry I went and looked at the wreck. What gets me down is the thought that I did it.’2
For much of the time there was little to do, apart from patrol and practice attacks on ‘enemy’ Battles. The problem, from the fighter pilots’ point of view, was not that there were too many Germans, but too few. When they did appear, usually flying high on cautious reconnaissance missions along the frontier defences, there was a rush to get at them that could produce moments of black farce. On 23 November, after weeks of fruitless patrols, bad weather and exercises, there was, for a change, plenty of activity. Between them 1 Squadron and 73 Squadron accounted for five Dorniers and a Heinkel 111. The Heinkel was heading home when it was spotted at 20,000 feet between Verdun and Metz by a section of three Hurricanes from 1 Squadron, who chased it over the German frontier. The effect of their repeated attacks was limited owing to the fact that at least eleven of the Hurricanes’ guns were frozen because of the altitude, a fault later remedied when engine heat was fed to the gunports. The last bursts, which finally brought the Heinkel down, were fired by Taffy Clowes, the ex-Halton boy who was one of the squadron’s most dogged and skilful pilots. As he was breaking away, six French Moranes rushed in, firing