Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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one of the elevators. The French pilot was forced to bale out and it was only by an extraordinary display of virtuosity that Clowes was able to nurse his machine back to Vassincourt, where he crash-landed. Richey noticed that, when he emerged from the cockpit, ‘though he was laughing he was trembling violently and couldn’t talk coherently’.3
Clowes’s experience was one of several dramas on an eventful day. Earlier Pussy Palmer had led a section from ‘A’ Flight against a Dornier, setting it on fire. The rear gunner and navigator escaped by parachute, but the pilot flew on. As Palmer drew alongside, the German throttled back, causing the Hurricane to overshoot. Then he fastened on to Palmer’s tail and opened up, hitting the aircraft thirty-four times. One round, which punctured the locker behind Palmer’s head and smashed the windscreen, would surely have killed him if he had not put his machine into a dive. With clouds of smoke issuing from the engine, he prepared to bale out, but when they dispersed, strapped himself in again and crash-landed with his wheels up. The others in the flight, Killy Kilmartin and Frank Soper, returned to the attack, and this time the Dornier went down. Miraculously the pilot seemed unharmed as he clambered out of his devastated machine, giving them a wave as they circled overhead.
The pilots were reluctant to abandon the notion that a trace of chivalry clung to the business of air fighting. That night, in a gesture the RFC would have recognized and applauded, 1 Squadron decided to honour the pilot who had fought so doggedly and well with dinner in the mess. By now he was in the hands of the French at Ste Menehould gaol, and Billy Drake, who like Richey spoke good French, was sent off to borrow him for the evening. His captors reluctantly let him go, on condition that he was accompanied by a gendarme and delivered to the citadel at Verdun when the evening was over.
His name was Arno Frankenberger, and he had been a glider pilot before the war, when he joined the Luftwaffe, volunteering for special reconnaissance duties. The pilots did their best to help him relax, removing trophies from the mess and insisting on first names. It was hard work. At first he stood up every time he was addressed by an officer. After a while he fell silent and put his head in his hands. Peter Matthews, a twenty-year-old pilot officer from Liverpool who had planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a vet, but applied for a short-service commission instead, watched what happened next. ‘He left rather hurriedly,’ he said. ‘When he came back in about five minutes’ time he was full of beans. He said, “You know, I was told by my officers that the British air force were a bunch of swine, but you’re all very nice chaps.”’4 In these improved spirits he boasted that the German maps of Britain were better than the ones of the German frontier the squadron had pinned up on the mess wall, and that the new variation of the Messerschmitt 109 was superior to the Hurricane.
The Hurricane pilots had yet to put this proposition to the test and would not come face to face with the Luftwaffe’s most lethal fighter until the spring of 1940. The intervening months were spent patrolling, training and learning what they could from limited experience. Pussy Palmer’s narrow escape had demonstrated the vital need for armour plating behind the pilot’s back. In front, there was a bullet-proof windscreen insisted upon by Dowding in the face of the objections of cost-conscious Air Ministry officials. The engine block also gave forward protection. The squadron put in a request for steel plates to be fitted behind the seat. Hawker’s were consulted, but again there were objections, this time on the grounds that the extra weight would upset the aeroplane’s centre of gravity and impair its flying performance. Bull Halahan was not deterred. The bomber pilots had armour. He tracked down a wrecked Battle and had the steel plating removed and fitted on a Hurricane. The squadron record book noted that ‘although this alters the flying characteristics…to some extent, it most certainly adds to the pilot’s confidence’. The benefit greatly outweighed the disadvantage. Hilly Brown, the Canadian short-service officer who at twenty-eight was one of the squadron’s most experienced pilots, was sent back to Britain with the modified aircraft and gave a demonstration of aerobatics that persuaded the Air Ministry experts to change their minds. By mid March 1940, all No. 1’s Hurricanes had been equipped, and from then on the armour was fitted as standard equipment to RAF fighters, saving many lives.
Halahan’s refusal to be baulked was characteristic. He was determined to introduce any innovation that added to the safety and efficiency of his men. Halahan was one of the first to realize that the official range at which fighter aircraft had their eight guns harmonized was misjudged and would significantly reduce their destructive power. Before the war Dowding had decided that concentrating machine-gun fire in a cone 400 yards ahead of a Hurricane or Spitfire was the most effective way of bringing down a big target like a bomber, while keeping his men at the limits of the enemy defensive fire. The decision had been taken in the innocent days when it seemed that bombers were all that Fighter Command were likely to meet. Halahan and his pilots were unconvinced. They doubted that at 400 yards .303 bullets still had the velocity to fly true and penetrate armour, or that the spread would be dense enough to destroy the target, especially if it was a small one like an Me 109. During the squadron’s annual month’s shooting practice in the spring of 1939, all the guns had therefore been quietly harmonized at 250 yards. The modification meant that pilots had to get in closer. But as events in France were to prove, it made the Hurricanes of 1 Squadron considerably more lethal than those of other squadrons shooting at the official range, and eventually the 250-yard harmonization became standard.
Another innovation was borrowed from the Luftwaffe. British fighters in France had the underside of one wing painted black and the other white, which the pilots felt made them look like flying chequer boards. German aircraft were duck-egg blue, to blend in with the sky and diminish their visibility to attackers lurking underneath. Halahan ordered the squadron machines to be painted the same colour, and this in turn was also adopted by all RAF fighters.
Contrary to his bruiser appearance, Halahan was a thoughtful officer who tried hard to divine the likely nature of the approaching battle and sought to prepare the squadron as best as he could, one evening delivering a lecture on what the war would mean for fighter pilots. He was equally concerned about the well-being of those under his command, introducing rotas to give pilots and airmen regular breaks and arranging diversions and encouraging excursions to make off-duty time as enjoyable as possible. Neuville, a cluster of utilitarian streets relieved by a few rustic half-timbered houses and presided over by a handsome Romanesque church, was welcoming enough. Pilots and airmen were treated with warmth in the houses where they lodged and durable friendships were made. The officers established their mess in the mairie. The sergeants set up an English-style pub in a café.
Paulette Regnauld, who was fourteen when the aviateurs Brittaniques arrived, remembered them as ‘polite and friendly. They mixed in well. There was a certain amount of flirting but they behaved themselves. They were generous and gave us meat and chocolate. At Christmas there was a big party at the mairie, where they chased all the pretty girls.’5 More than sixty years on she still retained some souvenirs. Sitting at the kitchen table in her house in the town square, she produced a postcard from an airman, William Mumford, sent from Uxbridge while on leave in February 1940. A photograph, printed in the dense monochrome of 1940 film, showed Pussy Palmer, Killy Kilmartin and several other pilots standing amiably in front of the church, smiling at the camera. The long shadows cast by the sinking winter sun throw the well-muffled silhouettes of the woman taking the picture and her female companion across the church steps. The pilots are in flying boots and sheepskin jackets. The cold is almost palpable.
Neuville, for all its friendliness, had its limitations. On days off pilots would fly up to Rouvres to meet their friends in 73 Squadron or head off to Nancy, Metz or Bar-le-Duc, where the Hôtel de Metz was their unofficial headquarters and the wife of the owner’s son, Madame Jean, welcomed them as if they were family. At Nancy the main attraction was the Roxy, described by Richey as ‘low-ceilinged with a dim, religious light. It had a bar at one end and a dance floor at the other. Round the plush-draped walls were crowded tables and comfortable chairs. The bar was invariably surrounded by a throng of British and French air force officers and “ladies of the evening”, waiting to be given a drink, a good time and anything else one could afford.’