Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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of Pontavert, a place of no military significance. The squadron spent only one night in its new home before being ordered to withdrew again, to Anglure, sixty miles to the south-east.
Passing through Reims on the way to Condé, the road party found the city deserted but the roads round about choked with refugees. The Germans were following a deliberate policy of attacking civilian columns to intensify panic, block the roads and further disrupt the Allied communications. Many pilots witnessed the carnage and felt disgust. One day, when Dennis David’s aircraft was unserviceable, he went for a walk near the airfield and met a column of Belgian civilians trudging into France.
The refugees were pushing prams and small handcarts, with a few horse-drawn carts, and there were even fewer cars. Women were carrying their babies, while toddlers staggered along holding their mother’s hand or dress. I borrowed an old motor bike from an army unit, and found a scene of desolation which it was impossible to describe. Old men, women and children, grandparents and babes in arms, not to mention dogs and horses, were strewn over the roadside, mostly dead but a few with just a flicker of life remaining. All had been torn to pieces by the bullets from strafing German aircraft, whose aim was to prevent the road being used by the British army, which was hoping to reinforce the British units already fighting the enemy further east. The whole episode utterly sickened me.15
Paul Richey, Sammy Salmon and Boy Mould came across a group of refugees passing through Pontavert. They piled up Salmon’s Lagonda with bread, bully beef and jam from the stores and distributed them while listening to their stories: ‘This child’s father had been killed by a strafing Hun; that young woman’s small daughter had had her brains ripped out by a bomb splinter.’ When they retold the stories later in the mess, there was at first a shocked silence. ‘Then a disillusioned Johnny [Walker] almost reluctantly said, “They are shits after all.” From this moment our concept of a chivalrous foe was dead.’16 There could be no comfort in the belief that German fighter pilots were above committing such atrocities. The normally languid Peter Matthews was sent one day to pick up a pilot who had crash-landed and ‘got mixed up with a terrible bombing and strafing of the roads. It wasn’t just the bomber aircraft who were doing the strafing. It was 109s and 110s. That didn’t seem to me a fighter pilot’s job in life.’17
The additional pilots and machines, and the daily squadron excursions from England, did little to curb the Luftwaffe’s freedom of action. The new pilots went up to be knocked down in what was becoming a battle of attrition that could end only one way. The newcomers plunged into an atmosphere of disarray, operating with minimal support and the sketchiest of orders. A pilot officer from ‘B’ Flight of 253 Squadron, who had just turned nineteen, arrived at Vitry on the evening of 16 May to be immediately confronted with a stark picture of what was happening. ‘We got out of our Hurricanes and there were two Lysanders [unarmed army cooperation machines] circling. Suddenly two Messerschmitt 109s came and shot them both down, and instead of rushing away or lying down we just stood there gawping at them.’ The flight was led by a forty-year-old Canadian, and comprised a sergeant pilot and four pilot officers, the latter ‘with no experience at all’. From the beginning to the mercifully swift end all was confusion. ‘We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. We were stuck in a field. There was another squadron on the other side of the field and if we wanted to know what was going on, someone had to run across to find out…they had a telephone, we didn’t.’
On 19 May an order was passed to them to take off and climb to a given height. Most of the pilots had early-model Hurricanes with fabric wings, no armour plating, radios with a range of only two miles and wooden two-bladed propellers. The flight commander’s machine was fitted with a new variable-pitch propeller, which allowed a faster rate of ascent. ‘He was climbing…and we were wallowing about below him. All the instruction we got from him was, “Get the lead out, you bastards.” We couldn’t catch him up. He got shot down before we got anywhere near, and so did the sergeant pilot. Suddenly the air was full of aeroplanes all over the place. I shot at one but whether I hit it or not I don’t know. Someone was on my tail so I got out of the way. I found myself completely alone. I didn’t even have a map. I didn’t know where I was. I thought, well, when we took off the sun was over there, so if I go that way I must be going somewhere near [the base]. I saw an airfield and landed and it was Merville. The first bloke I saw was someone who trained with me.’ By the time he reached the base, ‘the other three had found it and landed…We waited and waited and there was no sign of the flight commander or the sergeant pilot.’ Both were dead. The next day the surviving pilots were ordered to fly back to England.18
Given the small size of the force, the losses of men and aircraft were brutal and unsustainable. On 16 May, thirteen Hurricanes were lost, five pilots were killed, four wounded and two captured. On 17 May, sixteen Hurricanes were destroyed. No pilot died, but one was taken prisoner. The following day thirty-three Hurricanes were shot down, seven pilots were killed and five taken prisoner. On 19 May, thirty-five Hurricanes were shot down or crash-landed, eight pilots were killed, seven were wounded and three taken prisoner. The following day only twelve Hurricanes were lost and three pilots killed, but by then the battle was winding down and the first units were beginning to evacuate back to England.
The squadron hardest hit was 85, which had seven pilots killed in ten days. On one day alone, 16 May, six of their Hurricanes were shot down, with two pilots killed and three burned or wounded. On 20 May three were killed in an engagement with 109s over Amiens, including the new CO, Michael Peacock, who had been in command only for one day, having taken over from the exhausted Oliver. Two more squadron leaders were to die, Lance Smith of 607 and from 3 Squadron Patsy Gifford, the dashing Edinburgh lawyer who had won a DFC for shooting down the first German raider of the war. At least one officer of glittering promise was among the dead, Flight Lieutenant Ian Soden of 56 Squadron, who had been expected to play an important role in Fighter Command’s war. He flew his first sortie in France on Friday, 17 May. The following day he was up at dawn, claiming a Dornier and later an Me 109. By 6 p.m. he was dead, shot down by an Me 110 near Vitry. Some pilots just seemed unlucky. Soden’s squadron comrade, Flying Officer Tommy Rose, who survived the Battle of Barking Creek, had been killed a few hours earlier.
The return on these losses could not be justified. The habitual overclaiming gave the impression that the fighters were knocking down at least two Germans for each British plane lost. Churchill even claimed the figure was ‘three or four to one’. We know now that in reality the ratio was far less advantagous. After the first two days, before the fighter escorts arrived in force, there were only two days, 17 and 19 May, when the balance rose to two-to-one in the RAF’s favour. More worryingly for the future, in the crucial contest between fighters, the Messerschmitt 109s and 110s shot down more Hurricanes than Hurricanes shot down Messerschmitts.
The fighters were engaged in a pointless struggle. That was not, however, how some of the pilots saw it. Looking down from the heavens, ranging the length and breadth of the front, the squadrons should have had a better notion of how the battle was developing than the soldiers on the ground whose vision was restricted to the field in front of them. They also knew from bitter experience the strength and ability of the enemy in the air. Yet, despite the evidence, the pilots were anxious to keep fighting. Their morale seems to have been partly sustained by the message in the score sheet, which, although it may have reflected something like the truth in the case of a squadron like No. 1, was far from an accurate portrayal of the overall picture. ‘We were sure we had the measure of the Germans,’ Richey wrote. ‘Already our victories far exceeded our losses, and the squadron score for a week’s fighting stood at around the hundred mark for a deficit of two pilots missing and one wounded. We knew the Huns couldn’t keep going indefinitely at that rate, but we also knew we couldn’t keep it up much longer without help.’19 Richey pressed in person for reinforcements, telling a visiting senior officer that sending sections of three or flights of six up to protect bombers was useless and that a minimum of two squadrons was needed to provide proper cover.
But