Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop
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off, along with 54’s eight remaining serviceable Spitfires, on a cold grey morning. It was supposed to be their last sortie before going off for a rest. The formation crossed the coast at Gravelines in rain and mist, when Deere saw a lone Dornier nosing out of a cloud towards the Channel, apparently looking for ships to bomb. He peeled off with his flight to attack. He opened fire at 300 yards, hitting the port engine and setting it on fire. He was about to give another burst when bullets from the bomber’s rear gunner struck his engine, hitting the coolant tank. Merlin engines were cooled by a liquid called glycol, which flowed around the block through a vascular skein of metal tubing. Any bullet hitting the nose of the aeroplane was likely to rupture one of these pipes. The glycol drained rapidly away, and the engine seized in a few moments. Deere was enveloped in a fine spray of glycol, which turned to white smoke. He realized he had no hope of making it back to England and steered landwards, looking for a beach on which to crash-land. The drill was to land wheels up. Wheels down ran the lethal risk of cartwheeling if the undercarriage hit something. He put the Spitfire, Kiwi 1, down on the water’s edge, slithering through sand and spray and knocking himself out when his head hit the windscreen. When he came to, he climbed out and found a café, where he was told he had landed at Oost-Dunkerke, half-way between Dunkirk and Ostend. When he looked back, the tide was coming in and sea and sand closed over Kiwi 1 for ever.
A woman in the café bandaged his eye and he set off walking towards Ostend, where, he had been told, he stood the best chance of getting back to England. Deere, like the rest of the pilots, had no idea of the scale of the drama being played out to the south. They had been told they were participating in a planned withdrawal. The refugee traffic was so heavy on the road north that he turned back and decided to take his chances in Dunkirk. Travelling on a borrowed bicycle, he reached the outskirts of the town, where he began to understand the dimensions of the crisis. Seeing three British soldiers in a café, he asked a corporal if he could speak to someone in authority. ‘As far as I know,’ the corporal replied, ‘there isn’t anybody in authority at the moment. Me and my mates here are the only members of our company who have got back this far; where the hell the rest of them are and for that matter the rest of the British army, I haven’t a clue.’ Deere found them a few miles down the road. His outstanding impression was ‘one of discipline and control, despite the obvious exhaustion and desperation of the thousands of troops who, arranged in snake-like columns, stretched from the sand dunes to the water’s edge’.
A naval officer eventually arranged for him to be taken off in the destroyer HMS Montrose. During the long wait, the Luftwaffe was overhead constantly. There was panic when three bombers swept over the beach, bombing and strafing, pursued by a lone Spitfire, which broke off, badly hit, and glided inland. Deere was now in the position of seeing the air battle from the infantryman’s point of view. The waiting soldiers felt that the sky had been handed over to the Germans, from where they could bomb and shoot unmolested by the RAF. Trying to board the destroyer, Deere was pushed back by an army major. When Deere explained he was trying to rejoin his squadron, which was operating overhead, he was told: ‘For all the good you chaps seem to be doing over here you might as well stay on the ground.’15 Deere’s experience was not unique. A pilot from 17 Squadron, who was forced to bale out, had to fight his way aboard a departing boat after being told it was for the army only. Flying Officer Anthony Linney of 229 Squadron, who also had to abandon his aircraft over Dunkirk on 29 May, arrived in Dover to be abused by soldiers, who almost reduced him to tears.
The charge that the RAF had let the army down was repeated endlessly over the next months, provoking angry words and punch-ups when blue uniform and brown battledress met in pubs. It spread beyond the military, becoming part of the mythology of the early war. Fred Rosier, who had been badly burned while leading a detachment of 229 Squadron in France in May, told how his wife was travelling by train in a compartment with soldiers returning from Dover. ‘They were shouting, “Where was the bloody air force?” and so on. [She] turned to one of them and said, “Well, I can tell you where one of them is – in hospital and I’m just about to visit him.”’16
The accusation hurt the pilots, sometimes angered them, but they tended to understand. The fortitude of the troops impressed them deeply. Looking down on Dunkirk, they saw a scene they would never forget and thanked God they were not part of it. Brian Kingcome from his cockpit saw ‘beaches [that] were a shambles, littered with the smoking wreckage of engines and equipment…The sands erupted into huge geysers from exploding bombs and shells, while a backdrop to the scene of carnage and destruction was provided by the palls of oily black smoke rising from the burning harbour and houses…and hanging high in the still air. And yet there the orderly lines of our troops stood, chaos and Armageddon at their backs, patiently waiting their turn to wade into the sea.’17 Much of the smoke climbing into the sky came from oil-storage tanks around the town. George Unwin found that ‘you didn’t need a compass to get to Dunkirk. You took off from Hornchurch…and you just flew down the smoke and you were there. Those tanks were still burning weeks afterwards and it really was desolation, absolute desolation. It was a most incredible sight.’18
The pilots knew the effort they were making and the price they were paying. There were several explanations for the belief they were doing little or nothing. One was the smoke itself. Some of the action over the beaches was obscured by the canopy of filth. Another was altitude. Sailor Malan said afterwards, ‘We flew too high to be appreciated by our chaps and too low for Spits to operate at their best advantage.’19 Others disagreed. Tony Bartley claimed that orders had originally been given for the fighters not to venture below 15,000 feet because they would be at risk from the navy and army anti-aircraft guns, which were considered capable of dealing with low-flying raiders, and to stay above 20,000 feet, where they would not be visible from the ground. It was certainly true that British and French gunners could be a menace and many pilots reported being shot at by their own side.
Bartley’s new commander, Bob Tuck, had little faith in the anti-aircraft defences and decided to ignore the 20,000 feet instruction. ‘We realized that the dive-bombers were at 15,000 feet…Finally we disobeyed orders and we came down and started knocking off the Stukas…Bobby Tuck said, “Let’s go down and catch these fellows.”’20 Another reason for the RAF’s apparent absence was that much of the fighting took place away from the beaches as the fighters tried to intercept the German formations before they could reach the target area. In the experience of George Unwin, ‘Very little fighting took place over the beaches. What we tried to do was stop these people before they reached the beaches…What fighting did go on, most of it was inland.’21
Fighter Command’s performance was weakened, once again, by the absence of a comprehensive warning system, which made it impossible to predict the approach or strength of the attackers. Hugh Dundas, who had arrived with 616 Squadron to join the battle, thought that ‘probably half the times we went to Dunkirk, perhaps not quite as much as that, we didn’t actually get engaged at all’. Other squadrons, however, seemed to be in action every time they went up, which meant that the burden of strain and risk was unevenly spread. John Nicholas, a flying officer with 65 Squadron who shot down two 109s, remembered being airborne for ‘eight hours a day, beginning with being called about three o’clock by one’s batman…I must have done fifty-six hours in a week, which is more than you’d do in two or three months in peace time.’22
Unable to deploy forces at times of maximum necessity, the controllers were forced into the draining and wasteful tactic of constant patrolling. For this there were simply not enough aircraft or machines. ‘In ideal circumstances one should have had five or six squadrons there the whole time,’ Dundas said later. ‘There wasn’t anything like the strength to do that from dawn to dusk.’23 The pilots were convinced none the less that Dunkirk would have had a different outcome without