Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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mid 1930s, naturally embracing its credo of taking fun and flying equally seriously, making strong friendships and winning admirers throughout the service. His charm, the squadron chronicler recorded, was ‘magnetic and universal’.7 His forensic talents were at the disposal of all the squadron, fitter and pilot alike. Once he flew himself from London to a distant northern base to defend a ground-crew member, changing out of uniform and into wig and gown to demolish the authorities’ case. On the evening of 23 May, 92 Squadron set off on an evening patrol around Dunkirk. Bushell was leading, and when they encountered a formation of Heinkels, heavily protected by Me 109s and 110s, he ordered an attack. Tony Bartley heard him ‘swearing on the radio as he plunged into the bomber force’ with John Gillies and Paul Klipsch. All three were shot down. Klipsch was killed. Bushell and Gillies were captured. Bushell was last seen standing by his Spitfire, waving his scarf in farewell. He was a troublesome prisoner and was eventually murdered in March 1944 by the Gestapo after being captured in the aftermath of the Great Escape he helped to organize from Stalag Luft 111. He was, Brian Kingcome thought, ‘an amazingly great man’.8 The squadron diary admitted that the losses were ‘a very severe blow to us all’, and two days later 92 was moved to Duxford to rest and re-equip.
The 19 Squadron commander, Squadron Leader G. D. Stephenson, also went early, on the first day of Operation Dynamo. Once again there were more men than machines, and pilots, with the exception of section leaders, drew lots for who was to go. The twelve Spitfires left at breakfast time and encountered about twenty Stukas over the coast near Calais. They appeared to be unescorted, a circumstance that should have aroused suspicion, but caution vanished as the pilots, most of them going into their first real combat, saw the black crosses and the gull wings crawling unheedingly across the sky and prepared to attack. As they did so, thirty Me 110s came into view. One section, led by Flight Lieutenant G. E. Ball, broke off to engage them. The rest closed in on the Stukas. George Unwin, who had missed out in the draw, heard later what happened from the returning pilots. Stephenson, he said, ordered a Fighting Area Attack No. 1. ‘That meant a very slow closing speed in formation “vics” of three, attacking with a very slow overtaking speed so you could get a very good shot at it. That was the idea.’9 It worked, up to a point. The squadron shot down four, but then the 109s arrived. Pilot Officer ‘Watty’ Watson was hit by a cannon shell, baled out and disappeared. Stephenson was seen heading inland in a shallow glide, trailing blue smoke. It later turned out he landed safely but was taken prisoner. The squadron claimed five Stukas and two 109s, a reasonable return on their losses, if true. The arithmetic of the squadrons involved at Dunkirk, however, was no more reliable than that of the France-based units. Later they flew another patrol and were again ‘bounced’ by 109s. Sergeant C. A. Irwin was killed and Pilot Officer Michael Lyne shot in the leg. He nursed his Spitfire back across the Channel and crash-landed on Walmer Beach. This time it seemed that only one 109 had possibly been brought down, and that was unconfirmed.
Stephenson and Irwin were both very experienced men. Irwin was an ex-fitter, typical of the cadre of ground staff who, through ability and ambition, had got airborne and whose professionalism and technical expertise stiffened the pre-war squadrons. Stephenson, like White, had been at Cranwell and was therefore marked out for the RAF’s upper reaches. He was regarded as a brilliant pilot and had been an instructor at the Central Flying School. It was a teaching post, but it carried prestige in a service in which skill was of paramount importance. Like the 54 Squadron pilots, 19 Squadron decided after the first day that no matter how flawless the technique, the tactics that Stephenson and his generation epitomized were dead. ‘That was the end of going in slow,’ Unwin said. ‘In fact it was the end of all we knew because we realized we knew nothing. From then on it was get in fast and go out fast. And go close – a hundred yards. Get in close but go in fast and get out fast.’10
Some of the younger pilots discovered almost at once that they were good at air fighting. Also that they enjoyed it. ‘Prof Leathart described ‘that lovely feeling of the gluey controls and the target being slowly hauled into the sights. Then thumb down on the trigger again and the smooth shuddering of the machine as the eight-gun blast let go.’11 The best of them were pushed forward to fill the holes in the commanders’ ranks. Following the loss of Roger Bushell, Brian Kingcome and Bob Tuck were posted to 92 Squadron as flight commanders. Leathart himself was put in command of 54 to replace Squadron Leader E. A. Douglas-Jones, who had led the squadron on its first offensive patrol on 16 May but had not flown with it since and relinquished command nine days later on grounds of ill-health.
Covering the evacuation meant that pilots were in the air two, three or sometimes even four times a day. Exhaustion set in quickly. Replacement squadrons arrived at the 11 Group bases to allow the spent units a rest. Some of the new arrivals had seen very little of the war and were slow to appreciate how serious things had become. On 28 May Al Deere returned to Hornchurch after a patrol and noticed that the dispersal areas normally occupied by 65 and 74 Squadrons now had Spitfires with unfamiliar markings. They belonged to 222 Squadron, sent in while 65 and 74 were rotated out for a rest. Later that evening Deere met one of the flight commanders, Douglas Bader, who questioned him closely. Bader, as a pre-war regular and an ex-Cranwell cadet, had become a figure of myth in the RAF by an extraordinary demonstration of willpower, struggling back to serve in a fighter squadron after losing both legs in a flying accident. His biographer wrote that Bader and his pilots were not impressed by their first sight of their Hornchurch comrades and ‘gazed, startled, then with mild derision at pilots…walking around with pistols tucked in their flying boots and as often as not with beard stubble’. They also noticed that they seemed quiet and preoccupied, but did not consider the significance of this and regarded the guns and the three-day growth as ‘line-shooting’.12
The accusation of line-shooting could be intended lightly. Jokey boastfulness was an established part of ante-room and saloon bar banter. But it could also be something more grave. It was one thing to shoot a line with no expectation of being taken seriously; another to claim phoney successes or dramatize narrow escapes in an attempt to look heroic. To do so was to break the Fighter Boy code of levity at all times, and with it one of the few social taboos that counted. When Deere read Bader’s impressions later, he was not pleased. The Hornchurch pilots’ demeanour, he wrote with restraint, ‘was no “line-shoot”’.
The experience of the first two days of the evacuation had demonstrated that Fighter Command did not have the resources to mount continuous patrols over the battle area. There were not enough aircraft. Those that were available were limited by the amount of fuel they could carry. Brian Kingcome calculated that the average operational time a Spitfire without overload tanks could spend in the air was between an hour and a quarter and an hour and a half, allowing for five or ten minutes at full throttle (though this could stretch to two hours if the trip was uneventful). It was twenty minutes from Biggin Hill to the French coast. That, theoretically, left the pilots with a good half an hour over the beaches.13 But, in air fighting, the Merlin engines consumed fuel voraciously, and prudent pilots tried to preserve petrol on the outward journey. Sailor Malan found that ‘the only way we could fly to Dunkirk and have enough juice to have a few minutes over the battle area was by coasting and flying at sea-level up from Boulogne’.14 Even so, the return journey was often fraught with the dread of falling out of the sky.
At first, Park sent patrols off in sixes and twelves – flight and squadron strengths. This ensured that there was a more or less continuous fighter presence in the Dunkirk area from dawn to dusk. But it soon became clear that they did not carry the weight to deter the Luftwaffe bombers and fighters, which always greatly outnumbered the defenders. Fighter Command Headquarters had tried to increase the deterrent effect of the fighters by massing them in ‘wings’ of two or more squadrons, a tactic which had the drawback of leaving windows in the cover, during which the Germans could bomb unmolested.
On 28 May,