Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
Читать онлайн книгу.
view to the rear’ – something the Hurricane definitely did not possess. This sober assessment would turn out to be largely accurate. The aircraft was subsequently flown by Brown to the RAF experimental station at Boscombe Down for further testing.
The air force needed all the information it could get. The phoney war had, mercifully, given Britain the lull it needed to accelerate the manufacture of aircraft and the training of pilots, but it had provided little practical experience of modern air warfare such as the Luftwaffe had gained in Spain and Poland. Unlike 1 Squadron and 73 Squadron, the other four fighter units based in France had had little contact with the enemy. Their job was to support the BEF, which was doing nothing, and the buffer zone of Belgium lay between them and the Germans. Squadrons 85 and 87 were based at Lille-Seclin aerodrome, where they flew sector patrols in their Hurricanes. The two auxiliary squadrons, 607 and 615, which arrived in November still equipped with Gladiators, were in no position to inflict much damage on the Luftwaffe even if they had been called on to do so.
Roland Beamont joined 87 Squadron at Seclin in October after a rare moment of excitement. ‘Two days before they’d shot down their first enemy aeroplane. It was a Heinkel 111. I arrived just in time to take part in the celebrations with an Air Ministry photographer out there taking pictures of all the ground crew holding on to various parts of the Heinkel that had been sawn off it with black crosses.’ Photographs were also taken of the pilots running to their Hurricanes as if they had just been scrambled, a deception that Beamont was required to join in, even though he had never flown with the squadron. The Heinkel was the first enemy aircraft to fall in France in the Second World War and the pilot who destroyed it, Robert Voase Jeff, a twenty-six-year-old short-service commission officer, was rewarded with the Croix de Guerre by a grateful French government.
The moment soon passed. Beamont discovered that normal activity consisted of ‘endless patrols looking for enemy reconnaissance but we very seldom saw them. There was no radar to help. It was just a question of eyeballs.’10 It was not until January that he had his first brush with the enemy. The squadron had been moved to Le Touquet when appalling winter conditions made it impossible to operate from Seclin. It was a miserable day, with rain and scudding low cloud, and none of the pilots expected to be flying when a call came through from the wing operations room ordering two pilots up on an intercept. Beamont took off with John Cock, one of the Australians who had answered the call for recruits, and they were directed over their radio telephones to climb through the cloud, where they saw a ‘small speck’ a few miles ahead. Beamont ‘didn’t really know what it was. I could see it had got two engines. Streaks of grey started to come out of the back of it. It suddenly dawned on me that this was a rear gunner firing tracers…miles out of range.’ The pair finally reached the German at 19,000 feet, whereupon Beamont blacked out, the victim of inoxia or oxygen starvation, caused by the fact that the tube to his oxygen mask had disconnected. He came to, upside down and diving very fast, in time to roll upright and steer for home.
Nos. 607 and 615 Squadrons had also gained little experience from their months at a succession of bleak fields in the Pas de Calais. No. 615 set off from Croydon to its first French base at Merville. One flight was led by James Sanders, who after leaving Italy aged nineteen in 1935, and securing a short-service commission, had risen to the rank of flight lieutenant and acquired the nickname ‘Sandy’. He had recently been transferred to the squadron after a display of high spirits landed him in trouble with Harry Broadhurst, the commander of his old unit, 111 Squadron. One September morning at Northolt, with nothing much going on, Sanders had decided to perform a particularly hazardous trick involving taking off, roaring immediately upwards into a loop, then performing a roll at the top. Unknown to him, a meeting of senior officers was taking place at the time. Such exuberance was out of kilter with the stern mood of the times. He was placed under arrest by Broadhurst, who most of the pilots liked, but whom Sanders thought ‘a wonderful pilot but an absolute sod’. Broadhurst took him to see the Air Officer Commanding 11 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Gossage, who was more sympathetic and asked him what he would like to do. Sanders mentioned France. ‘He said, right, off you go,’ Sanders recalled. ‘So I was posted to 615 Squadron, demoted from Hurricanes to Gladiators, which were twin wings, and from a regular squadron to an auxiliary.’11
With his departure there was an incident that almost altered the course of the war. Winston Churchill had gone to Croydon to see the squadron off, accompanied by his wife, Clementine. The Gladiators were escorting five transport aircraft loaded with fifty-four airmen and stores, and so had their machine-guns, one on either side of the fuselage and one under each lower wing, cocked and ready. The firing system was notoriously unstable. As Churchill inspected Sanders’s machine, Clemmie climbed into the pilot’s seat and began asking the functions of various knobs and buttons. Just as Churchill stooped to examine one of the wing-mounted machine-guns, his wife reached for the firing button. Sanders moved rapidly. ‘I got her out of the aircraft fast,’ he said. ‘It suddenly dawned on me what an idiot I’d been.’
For much of the winter 615 Squadron was based at Vitry-en-Artois. Sanders was billeted with other officers in the village in the house of an elderly women who still dressed in black in mourning for the husband she had lost in the previous war. After dinner in the mess, which the officers set up in a local hotel, ‘they would arrive back and there would be Margot with a tray with some hot bricks with some cloth wrapped round them. I’d always say, “Non, non Margot, ce n’est pas necessaire,” but she’d insist. Then at five o’clock in the morning she’d be there with a café noir.’ When he returned to see her after the war he learned she had performed the same services for the Germans, for which even-handed hospitality she was branded a collaborator by her neighbours.
The pilots found that interaction with their French counterparts tended to be more social than professional. Sandy Sanders and his comrades ‘used to go and have parties at Lille with their squadrons, then we would go to a night-club and they would produce the girls. The French were mad keen on that subject, but all we were interested in was the drinking, having a good party. You might say, “Look at that lovely blonde over there,” but that’s as far as it went. But the French, one by one, would take the girls away and we’d be left, every one of us, drinking until two or three in the morning, having a wonderful time with the French orderly officer waiting for us to finish our fun and go away.’ The squadron’s enterprising adjutant had arrived with a suitcase full of French letters, as condoms were known to British servicemen, hoping to sell them to pilots and airmen, but custom was non-existent.
The squadron passed its time training on its obsolete aircraft, carrying out ‘affiliation’ exercises with bomber squadrons and mounting patrols over the Channel. On 29 December Sanders managed to get within range of a Heinkel 111 flying very high above the sea at 26,000 feet and emptied his ammunition at it without visible result. The squadron was told on 1 January, during a visit by the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Captain H. H. Balfour, that it was likely the unit would be re-equipped with Hurricanes within a fortnight. It was not until 12 April that the first machines started to arrive, and the squadron, like 607 Squadron, had only a few weeks in which to get accustomed to them in conditions of relative calm. The transition was still in progress when the frustrations, apprehensions and scares of the phoney war finally came to an end.
As so often on the eve of a great upheaval, the preceding days passed in an unnatural atmosphere of tranquillity. Denis Wissler arrived in France on 2 May to join 85 Squadron at Sacerat. On 6 May he spent the morning sunbathing, went on patrol for one hour forty-five minutes at lunchtime and spent the rest of the day playing pontoon and Monopoly. The following day he did no flying at all and got ‘as sunburned as I have ever been before’. On 8 May, as orderly officer, he was deputed to show a visiting actress, Victoria Hopper, and a concert party over a Hurricane, and in the evening went to the show, which on ‘the whole was damn good’. On 9 May he was on patrol again when an excited controller directed them to investigate some enemy aircraft. ‘However nothing was seen and we returned home,’ he recorded despondently in his diary. ‘Nothing else happened during the day apart from some patrols and directly after dinner I went to bed.’
It was the last good rest he would get for some time. The same evening