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,IFE AS A "ATTLE OF "RITAIN 0ILOT

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!T TWENTY THREE YEARS OF AGE

"ARRY 3UTTON HAD EXPERIENCED MORE THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON EXPERIENCES IN A LIFETIME 4HIS BOOK BASED ON A DIARY HE KEPT DURING THE "ATTLE OF "RITAIN

COVERS 3EPTEMBER TO 3EPTEMBER DURING WHICH TIME BASED AT .ORTH 7EALD ONE OF &IGHTER #OMMAND S MOST IMPORTANT FIGHTER STATIONS HE SHOT DOWN THREE 'ERMAN FIGHTERS AND WAS SHOT DOWN TWICE HIMSELF )T IS ALSO THE STORY OF HIS FAMILY

HIS WIFE WHOM HE MARRIED IN THE MIDST OF THE EPIC AIR BATTLE AND WHO HELPED HIM SURVIVE THE HORRIFIC INJURIES HE SUSTAINED AFTER BAILING OUT OF HIS BURNING (URRICANE FIGHTER PLANE

a

Fighter Boy Life as a Battle of Britain Pilot

AVAILABLE NOW FROM: www.amberleybooks.com

Fighter

Boy

To Sylvia Aircraftwoman S.V. Sutton

Fighter

Boy

Life as a Battle of Britain Pilot BARRY SUTTON, DFC

This new edition first published 2010 First published in 1942 as The Way of a Pilot: A Personal Record Amberley Publishing Plc Cirencester Road, Chalford, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL6 8PE www.amberleybooks.com Copyright Š The Estate of Barry Sutton 1942, 2010 The right of Barry Sutton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978 1 84868 849 0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10pt on 12pt Sabon.

Typesetting and Origination by FONTHILLDESIGN. Printed in the UK.

CONTENTS

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Introduction by Caroline Sutton Abbreviations Authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Note Introducing Barry by Lovat Dickson Sergeant Pilot Barry Sutton Training Going Solo Move to Nottingham Volunteer Reserve R.A.F. 56 Squadron, North Weald August 1939 Phoney War First Encounter Martlesham The Calm Before the Storm, Christmas 1939 Spring 1940 France, May 1940 Hospital Leave Return to North Weald First Blood August 1940 Postscript by Lovat Dickson Log Book & Combat Reports The Summer of the Firebird List of Illustrations

7 14 15 16 23 29 32 37 40 43 51 62 66 70 74 78 112 133 136 141 144 149 157 160 171 184

INTRODUCTION

BY CAROLINE SUTTON One day – it must have been in 1961 – I was crouched in front of the fire with my mother, toasting teacakes. It was one of those autumn days when what looks like a morning mist hangs around all day in thick, damp strands. Like all the R.A.F. houses we had ever lived in, this one was cavernous and cold, heated by ancient radiators which scalded you if you sat on them. My sister and I once counted 54 rooms in the house, including the scullery and outhouse, most of them unused. Near the back stairs, in the kitchen there was a panel of round black and red bells with the names of various rooms on them, to summon servants long since gone. The bells, the serving hatch with a rope pulley and the third floor bedrooms with brown lino floors, were reminders, not of more glamorous times but that the house’s heyday had been during grim and bustling days of the war.

The kitchen and sitting room were at opposite ends of the house.

We used to draw straws to see who’d run from one to the other to make tea or get the papers. My parents chose this room to try to keep warm with a coal fire and we’d sit on the floor around it, as close as possible.

That particular day I was alone in the house with my mother.

My father was at work. I always imagined him flying, but he was probably doing paperwork. My sister had gone to town on the bus.

My mother and I spent the afternoon in the sitting room, on the 7

Fighter Boy

lumpy chintz sofa, playing scrabble and giggling. As the light faded, the room became ominously cold. My mother suggested I be an angel and run to the kitchen for a toasting fork. I said we could make do with the poker. We had the butter softening on the hearth and tea cakes blackening on the end of the poker, when the door bell rang, echoing around the hall.

My mother looked up, one side of her face pink from the fire. ‘If it’s gypsies, tell them to go away’. Hugging myself to keep warm, I went to the front door, expecting to see a waif dressed in rags, holding a bundle of twigs. But, standing in the middle of the doorstep in the gloom was a short, elderly stranger with a paisley headscarf tied, like the Queen, under her chin. Even in the fading light, I could see her eyes, bright blue and sharp. Her small nose was squashed like a boxer and she announced herself to be my father’s mother.

I don’t remember my parents’ reaction to this visit. My grandmother had not been seen or heard of since she left my grandfather in the Argentine, when my father was three. My mother no doubt, carried off the occasion in her usual high style, offering my grandmother a cup of tea or a gin and tonic and gesturing toward the sofa. I guess that like the many dramatic and surprising things that had happened during his life, my father took it in quietly, in his stride.

A few weeks after that, he took me flying in a Tiger Moth. I sat like Biggles in a leather helmet, in front of him, connected by a rubber pipe through which we could speak to each other. The little plane bumped and roared along the runway and we were lifted, suddenly through the cold autumn air. Up we flew, over the hedge at the end of the runway, dipping over the red roof of our house, up over the woods and the fields. The cockpit was open to the skies and as we climbed, the ragged clouds broke all around us, the little plane now chugging like a sewing machine. I held onto the controls as my father had told me. ‘Turn, gently, to the right, toward the horizon’.

The plane dipped sharply. ‘Gently, gently. You’re doing fine. Now level her up’. The clouds were billowing white beneath us, the sky a pure and brilliant blue and, as we flew, laughing through the silent, tumbling air, I understood something new about my father.

8

Introduction by Caroline Sutton

One of the first words I think of in connection with him is ‘brave’.

The word has a Boy’s Own quality which people associate with men who flew in the Battle of Britain. But ‘brave’ also suggests vulnerability, and I have sometimes wondered if my father’s bravery, a sense of having nothing more to lose, began the day his mother left him in the Argentine.

When people talk of him as a Fighter Pilot – One of the Few – it’s tempting to see him as a single-minded, clench-jawed figure, striding out toward his Spitfire with gritty determination. My main memories of him are very different. I remember him as a dreamy, diffident, funny man, floating rather than striding through life. He had a drifting quality, impossible to grasp as a cloud - more air than earth, water than fire. I am ashamed but not surprised that so much of his life has remained a mystery to me.

I do know some facts about him in wartime. I know that he was in 56 Squadron, that he flew Spitfires and Hurricanes. I know he was in the Battle of Britain and received the Distinguished Flying Cross. I know he was stationed at North Weald for a while and that he spent four years in Burma where he kept a pet mongoose. That he was shot down three times and that he wrote three books during the war.

Scant facts. My father used to joke about being outnumbered by women. Perhaps as well as sharing his passion for riding, fishing and motor bikes, a son would have made it his business to know more about him: where he was stationed, how many sorties he made, how many enemy planes he shot down. But although I’m short on facts, I have gathered or created a sense of my father in those years.

I can see him, for example, sitting with other pilots in the hangar, waiting for a siren call to scramble. His mates had jokey names like Sheepy Lamb, Chalky White and Nobby Clarke. They are in a corner of a grey-green space, high-domed like the sky. There are pictures of Jane Russell and Rita Hayworth (my father’s favourite) tacked to the walls, ashtrays on scratched, glass-topped tables. They are lounging in wicker chairs, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea, playing cards, telling jokes. My father’s long legs are stretched out, his hands looped together. Beside each man, on the floor, is a leather flying 9

Fighter Boy

jacket and helmet. Then, obliterating the talk and laughter, comes the subterranean scream of the siren. The men jump up, pulling on their jackets. They run full tilt into the cold air toward their planes, dispersing like mercury on glass towards their separate fates.

One time he was shot down over the French countryside. He told me that, like most people, the first time he’d done a parachute jump, he had to be pushed. This time, as his plane’s engine, spluttered and failed, I imagine he flung himself clear without a thought. He floated down near trees and the parachute caught in some branches. I can see him lying there for a moment, face down in the mud and winded, then crawling to a barn for shelter. He hid in hay bales until the farmer found him and took him in. He stayed in the farmhouse for three days and the family fed him fresh eggs and home-made bread. I expect they were delighted by him.

I imagine him coming home on leave, hurrying to see my mother, changed out of her W.A.A.F. uniform into a short crêpe dress and silk stockings she’d queued for hours to buy. One time, they saved up so they could celebrate seeing each other again by sharing ham sandwiches in a tea shop near Russell Square. Another time, when he was on long leave from Burma, my mother rented a flat they could hardly afford in Lansdown Crescent in Bath and, four years after they married, they had a honeymoon.

A few years before he died, I was driving my father through a pine forest in Wales. I’d got us lost and as the sun set behind the gloomy trees and we bumped over forestry tracks, I asked my father if there had been any time in the war when he thought he was dying. He surprised me by saying, quite definitely, that there had been. It had been in Burma. One morning he’d got up early to fly to Rangoon.

There was a thick, morning mist after a night of tropical rain. As he took off and turned the plane, the mist had suddenly cleared and he saw that he was heading straight into a mountainside ‘I saw the mountain rushing towards me – I saw the rocks and the trees. I really thought that was it.’ We were both silent for a while. Then my father took over and navigated us out of the pine forest, back onto the road.

10

Introduction by Caroline Sutton

Years before that, I found an old leather writing case at the back of a drawer. Inside was a telegram, furry with age and folded. The large, typed letters looked as if they had been pasted on to the middle of the page, like an anonymous letter. The message, stark and brief, was that my father was missing in action, presumed dead. My mother received these sorts of communications three times during the war.

I’ve never been able to imagine how she felt when she read them.

After the second time he’d been shot down, my father spent several months in hospital in Southampton, badly burned. My mother used to visit him in a ward full of young men, some of whom were so disfigured that their girlfriends screamed and ran when they saw them and never came back. I can imagine my father’s shy and wonderful smile as he saw my mother walking towards him. His wounds healed well, so that eventually the only sign of damage was that the index finger on his left hand was missing. Sometimes, when he was reading or filling his pipe with tobacco, I looked at the knuckle of his missing finger, round and bare as an egg on his elegant hand, and I understood that however much we took him for granted, it was a miracle that he had survived.

I don’t know if he thought about himself in such dramatic terms.

He was a physically courageous man and, like my mother (who’d also been orphaned and had a strong streak of amused irony which didn’t permit self- indulgence), I think my father’s impulse was to get on with life.

He certainly continued to take risks. He stayed in the R.A.F. after the war, partly because he loved flying. He flew whenever and whatever he could – jets, gyrocopters, fighter planes, gliders.

He rode motor bikes and went midnight steeple chasing. He took part in pentathlons and went on outward bound courses. He often asked, rather wistfully, if ‘one of you girls’ would like to go riding or fishing. My mother once declared ‘I’ll go fishing when you catch smoked salmon’ and that about summed up our involvement in his activities.

I did go riding or fishing with him a few times. On those days, when we cast our lines at the edge of a trout stream or sat quietly 11

Fighter Boy

under a tree eating sandwiches, I caught his wonderful dreamy enthusiasm for life. He was delighted, almost grateful to have me along, as one who expects to be solitary can be.

Perhaps those would have been the times to ask him about the war, to get to know him better. But like most families, we bumbled along on assumptions about each other and, just as he didn’t volunteer much information, I don’t think it occurred to me to ask. And so it was astonishing to me when, forty years after the war, he came down from his study with a long and passionate poem about the Battle of Britain. It is called The Summer of the Firebird (see back of the book for the full poem) and it told me more than I had ever known about my father. It was as if a whole dimension which had been turned away was now visible. It describes flying that summer, the choking fumes of cordite and fuel, the skeins of burning flesh and the babbling fear. It describes his sadness at finding a wallet containing two tickets for a Berlin theatre and belonging to a German who’d been shot down and killed. It told me something of the early and tender days of my parents’ life together, his pleasure at seeing her face after a long separation. The poem describes flying in formation, alongside friends, the joking now to one side. The shouted, crackly communication from one to another, the horror of seeing a friend’s plane spiralling down in smoke and flames. It conveys what probably accounts for his reticence about his achievements: his own destiny was inseparable from the other men he flew with.

When he was dying, at home in Jersey, my father liked my sister and me to sit with him and read. He didn’t mind what we read – poetry, stories, articles from the newspaper. He liked the sound of our voices. His bed – my parent’s bed – had small dormer windows in the sloping ceiling and it faced out onto the crescent shaped harbour. During the day you could smell the salt from the sea and hear seagulls squabbling on the sea-wall. My sister and I would take it in turns to read to my father or lie on the bed and listen to the radio with him. If he was in pain, he never said so. He lay pale and very thin, his elegant hands on the bedclothes, the outline of his toes almost over the end of the bed.

12

Introduction by Caroline Sutton

One afternoon, when he was half asleep and dreaming, he looked toward the end of the bed as if he were seeing a wonderful and endless procession of people. He said simply and quietly ‘Such fine men’. That evening, my sister and I sat reading with him. The sky was black through the little windows and you could hear the sea slapping against the harbour wall. Out in the dark, I had the sense of a flock of birds flying over the house. I couldn’t see them but their slow, feathery wings beat softly as they flew over the roof and I knew then that my father did not have long to live.

What things do you keep in memory of a life lived so fully? The obvious mementoes are those from the war. I have some of his log books, written in his neat, spidery hand. ‘Weather fair with cumulus cloud. Took off in light breeze.’ His medals, which I remember on his blue grey uniform on special occasions, are now in a glass case. At the back of my wardrobe is his leather flying jacket which still holds a suggestion of his shape. And on the book shelves, hardback copies of his books which I recently read from cover to cover.

Sometimes other people, usually men, ask to see these log books or the medals. They turn them over slowly and gently, like relics. I stand by with silent, childlike pride. I hope they won’t ask questions that I can’t answer and show me to have, in their eyes, a shocking ignorance of the facts.

Then there are the other, smaller, surprising things that summon him up with a hurricane force. Just last year, for instance, my sister gave me a silver locket. With it was a note about my father that said ‘He kept these in his desk in a green satin box which I found in a chaos of old papers, fishing hooks and jammy paints’. Inside the locket were two perfect, pale and tiny shells. I don’t know where my father collected them or what his thoughts were when he put them in the satin box. But those delicate shells contain part of my father.

They hold something of his bravery, just a little of his magic.

Caroline Sutton

13

ABBREVIATIONS A.A. Anti-aircraft (fire) A.F.C. Air Force Cross A.O.C. Air Officer Commanding C.O. Commanding Officer D.F.C. Distinguished Flying Cross D.S.O. Distinguished Service Order F.T.S. Flying Training School F/Lt Flight Lieutenant F/Sgt Flight Sergeant M.O. Medical Orderley M.U. Maintenance Unit P/O Pilot Officer R.F.C. Royal Flying Corps R.A.F.V.R. Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve R/T Radio Telephone Sec. Lt Second Lieutenant S/Ldr Squadron Leader U/S Unserviceable V.A.D. Voluntary Aid Detachment W.A.A.F. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force W/Cdr Wing Commander

14

AUTHORâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S NOTE

Ivor Brown once said of a book that it read as though it might have been written by a schoolboy coming round from an anaesthetic.

These ramblings were conceived in hospital and in that moment of greyest boredom which seems to be the inevitable hangover of ether.

And after all, I am still perhaps not so much older than the pre-war schoolboy.

B.S.

15

INTRODUCING BARRY

BY LOVAT DICKSON The author of this book, who is a ďŹ ghter pilot, is twenty-three years old, and has been in combat with the enemy since the outbreak of the war. He was wounded and shot down in France in the spring of 1940. After a short sojourn in hospital, he fought again in the Battle of Britain, and baled out from his blazing Hurricane in August 1940, descending by parachute in the outskirts of Canterbury. He spent a year in hospital recovering from the terrible burns received in that action. Now, a year later, a Squadron Leader, he is piloting his Hurricane in the Far East. He is a persistent young man, with so dogged a determination to come at the enemy that these multifarious and painful adventures, one of them almost fatal, have not sufďŹ ced to keep him and his machine out of the sky.

In what I write I must avoid saying anything that might present him in any heroic light, knowing that I should thereby cause him acute embarrassment, and should lose his friendship, which I much value. Actually nothing that I can say can enhance the account given here. His story is typical of that of the many young men wearing the uniform of the R.A.F., it is neither more heroic nor less so than theirs.

These young men have tenacity, a disciplined subordination to a tradition, and an increasing feeling of personal hostility against the enemy. They are a band of brothers united in a faith that is almost mystical. The roots of this go back further than the two years we have 16

Introducing Barry by Lovat Dickson

had of war. The men of the R.A.F. come from widely different classes; they differ greatly in origin, upbringing, and education. There is nothing in all this that serves to unite them. Nor can patriotism, for all its value, be said to be the unifying force. No country in the world can have attracted to herself so much love as England. But prominent in action and performance among the men of the R.A.F. are Canadians, Australians, South Africans, Indians, New Zealanders; Poles, Dutch, French, and Czechs. When they think of their homeland they do not think of the green ďŹ elds and hills of England, but of lands as far apart as New Zealand and Newfoundland, Canada and India, and the great plains, the wooded valleys, and the mountains of Europe.

Who can tell what it is that unites them and drives them on? They hate repression and love liberty, and the thought of submission to the threat of a conqueror strikes, I think, a chord of ironic laughter in their youthful hearts. In this they share the feelings of all free and courageous men. But it is happily granted to them as individuals to give personal expression and gesture to their feelings. The Hurricane, which Barry Sutton piloted and drove amongst enemy squadrons, was an avenging sword, and for that instant he alone, this boy of twenty-three, held the hilt in his young hands.

Barry Sutton was born in an old house in Oxfordshire on 28 January 1919. I did not see him until he was two years old, when he came with his parents to pay a visit to Canada en route to the Argentine, where his father, a soldier in the last war, had bought a ranch with expectations of making a fortune and enjoying a sporting life at the same time. The ranch made no fortune, but took his, and since the sporting life could not be supported without an income, he returned after a few years to England.

But while the purchase of the ranch was being negotiated and an establishment arranged, Barry remained in Canada for a year and lived with his grandfather, who was my father. The establishment of three males, my father, who was sixty, myself twenty, and Barry, who was two, was complemented by my sister, Barryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aunt, and a housekeeper on whose future life, as it turned out, Barry was to have some inďŹ&#x201A;uence.

17

Fighter Boy

We lived in the Rocky Mountains, half-way between the prairies and the sea. The Canadian National Railway made its way through the mountains to the Pacific by a pass called the Yellowhead Pass, along which the relics of camps and the marks of voyageurs and fur-traders of a century before could still be seen. From the floor of this wide valley, the mountains reared upwards to heights varying between eight thousand and eighteen thousand feet. The air was clear and fresh and impregnated with the scent of pine and spruce and fir. Lakes that were icy-cold all summer seemed to lie in every basin formed by the confluence of three or four peaks. There were no motor roads; one could go afield directly East and West by means of the railroad; otherwise all movement was undertaken on horseback.

The sound of the horses’ hooves on the rocky paths, the dripping of water from the trees, down the face of rocks, of innumerable little streams cascading from the snows higher up: these were the sounds one heard in that still and stony land, except where the houses and mine buildings of a mining village lay stacked, like a pack of illshuffled cards, against one cheek of a mountain called Baldy.

Our house stood on the slope of a foothill that led up to the rocky face of Baldy. When the wind blew it came whistling over his top and trumpeted its way down the valley. Such winds they were, too.

A truck standing on the railroad siding was once lifted off the tracks and somersaulted like a cardboard box into Brule Lake which lay below the railway. But the strong wind blew only at certain seasons of the year; at other times the air was still and unmoving, scintillating with frost in the winter, fresh and exhilarating from its brush against the snowy peaks over which it had swept in the warmest days of the summer. On moonlit nights the sky was majestic and sublime.

The mountains and the stars seemed part of the same pattern, and looking upwards on clear nights from the floor of the valley, the imaginative child could believe what he was told, that the hills were the warm blankets, and the sky the golden linen that wrapped him in and kept him warm and safe during the long night.

My father brought Barry from the East, a journey of three and a half days by train. Between them a warm friendship had been 18

Introducing Barry by Lovat Dickson

struck, and when they arrived they were ‘Dick’ and ‘Barry’ to each other. My father was an unconventional and independent man. God knows how he had accomplished the task of bathing and dressing a two-year-old boy on a train journey of three days. Whatever the ministration he had had, Barry arrived whole and in good fettle, with one of my father’s pipes clutched in his mouth. Behind this unaccustomed object, from which henceforward he could hardly ever be separated, his own small face, puckered with thought but not anxiety, contemplated the new faces and the change of scene that surrounded him.

It was a strange life for a child. From daylight until dark we were in the saddle, or afoot over the hills, or down the depths of the mine.

We treated Barry with something of the care and consideration due to his age when he first arrived, but our own preoccupations and our active way of living could not sustain that for long. We fell into the habit of propping him up on the saddle in front of us, of setting him between us on the speeder, a small infernal combustion engine which dashed up and down a spur of the railway line from the coal-mine to the station three miles below. When for some reason we could not take him with us, we gave him to one of the teamsters called Smithy, who hauled logs and equipment about the mountain; and Barry, with his pipe ever stuck in his teeth and his miniature body in a pair of overalls, would disappear over a hill, his small figure swaying on the buckboard side by side with Smithy’s stalwart one. He would be delivered back as night fell, tired but happy, and made ready for bed by the housekeeper, Anne.

Smithy, leaning against the kitchen door as dusk fell, his charge delivered and his day’s work done, fell into conversation and subsequently into love with Anne, and when Barry left the mountains they came together to see him off. I remember the day, for we were all sad and bleak of spirit. But Anne’s grief was audible and very sniffy. Smithy put his arm around her to give her comfort, and Barry stood on tiptoe to kiss them both goodbye. Within a month of his leaving they were married.

Barry went to South America and lived on the ranch for a year 19

Fighter Boy

with his parents, attended to by a Spanish nurse and his fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s groom. He remembered nothing of that year, or of the Argentine, but he remembered the voyage back across the South Atlantic, and returning to the village in Oxfordshire where he had been born.

He was four years old, and the year was 1923. I did not see him again until 1929, when I returned to England from Canada. He was ten years old then, and I went on a Saturday afternoon to see him play cricket at his school. We had tea together afterwards in a teashop in that Northamptonshire village, and I was proud to be seen in the company of such an attractive, fresh-faced young boy.

I invited him to come and spend part of his holidays with me in London. He came, and then, and on later holidays, we walked together through the old parts of London where the grandfathers and great-grandfathers whom we shared had walked in the century before. I told him something of our family story, the history of a plain, God-fearing, seafaring, and adventurous family from Inverness-shire who had gone to every part of the British Empire and taken root there so that when the last war came cousins manifested themselves with strange accents and huge frames in the uniforms of Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders. After the war they had gone back, but we remembered them in the family, and wondered whether we would ever have an Empire pow-wow of the same kind again. In 1931 it seemed hardly likely. Yet, ten years from then, the small boy walking at my side would be in the company of his Empire cousins in the Far East.

We spent many of his school holidays together. Nearly twenty years separated us in age. I was a bachelor uncle, and he the child of parents who had gone their own ways; and from his grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house in Northamptonshire he descended on London at Christmastime and in the summer; was bedded in a temporary structure in the telephone room of the house where I had quarters; was left alone part of the day while I worked; and in the afternoons and evenings, and at the weekends, came with me as my familiar wherever I was going.

A handsome, serious boy, with certain youthful ecstasies such as an appreciation for the ďŹ lms of the Marx Brothers and for ice-cream; 20

Introducing Barry by Lovat Dickson

with certain youthful characteristics such as an immense scorn for girls of his own age or younger. I watched him grow through these years, becoming longer and thinner, becoming more serious and contemplative; talking less about what he meant to do in the future, and more about the political state of the world, a subject in which we were all taking an increasing interest.

Two years before the war he went into the R.A.F. He was then nineteen. It had seemed to me who belonged to the blind or fatalistic or hoodwinked generation that, in spite of the portents, war could not possibly come; and that life in the R.A.F. offered a certain amount of adventure and a healthy existence for a young man in the most difďŹ cult period of his youth. I thought the R.A.F. an admirable plan. But when the war broke out, I own to having felt appalled that I had not counted the possible dangers for him before, though the tide of events seemed to be carrying us towards a climax in which the existence of us all, not only of the young and brave, would be involved.

But pending annihilation, all I had to cope with was a bad cold.

Barry came to see me, looking taller and more manful than ever in his long R.A.F. coat and peaked cap, leading by a leash a nondescript dog who had accompanied him throughout his training. I was in a state of civilian fretfulness and the foreboding that the middle-aged can feel. Barry was in a state of exaltation that the chance of action arouses in the adventurous young. We talked of the war. Barry was polite, but obviously the subject was not one which he wanted to debate. The future was something which it was impossible to explore, so we talked of the past; of our joint past and adventures, beginning with the house in the Rocky Mountains, of which he remembered nothing, and coming down the twenty years since; remembering the family jokes, our excursions, our walks through London, the people, old and young, funny and admirable, whom we had met in those years.

When it was growing dark, he collected the mongrel from the corner of the room into which it had crept, and said goodbye to me. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Look after yourself, Uncle, and get rid of that cold.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; A sense of my 21

Fighter Boy

own superfluousness swept over me. ‘Look after yourself, Barry, and come back safely.’ He laughed: ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll make a landing somewhere, don’t you worry.’

Within a few months he was in France. From then until now, except for sojourns in hospital recovering from his wounds, he has never ceased to fly against the enemy. In two years of war he has grown older, more sedate, paler, a good deal quieter. The exuberance of youth has gone from him at twenty-three. But the characteristics and mannerisms of youth have been replaced by other qualities, part frightening to behold, part admirable. Into the hearts of him and his generation in the R.A.F. has come a steely, implacable determination: a determination to destroy the enemy. These boys have become relentless men; once the adventurous and carefree members of a new and active branch of the service, they have become the avengers for the wrongs done to mankind all over the world. Is this dramatising their feelings too much? Are they not still young and exuberant?

Haven’t they still the hearts and feelings of the boys they still are?

They have; but I think that when the tide turns, as soon it must and will, and the armies of the aggressors roll back upon their frontiers, a toll will be taken of the enemy for the years they have been marauders, a vengeful toll in which the Russians, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, the Chinese, all those who have seen with their eyes the wrongs done against their own people and against humanity, will share. When that day comes, the Hurricane pilot who was once the baby with the pipe in his mouth, riding on the pommel of a saddle through the passes of the Rockies, and who a few summers back was playing cricket for his school, will be among the avengers. He and his kind, the schoolboys of England, whom the enemy made men before their time, will be flying high in the vanguard of the march which the free men of the world will be making towards the citadels of the enemy.

Wherever you may be, Barry, when this book of yours appears, good luck and a happy landing!

22

1

SERGEANT PILOT BARRY SUTTON

For me this is a day of triumph. For the first time in two months I have been able to feed myself with my own hands. The wads of cotton wool and bandages are off at last.

Those of us in this R.A.F. hospital who have to be in bed all day keep ourselves amused by the simple expedient of making fun of each other. A month ago this ward was almost empty and John, who had the place to himself, had more time to remember that he had lost a leg. Since then there has been quite a big influx of casualties. These are nearly all fighter boys who have ‘bought something’ in the recent heavy fighting over the South-East Coast and London Area.

Peter, who broke a shoulder blade and an elbow when he hit the tailplane of his Spitfire after baling out, has his arm in a magnificent contrivance of wire struts which we call ‘The Birdcage’. David has his ‘crash hat’ of plaster to strengthen his neck which he tells us was bent when he hit a haystack in a forced landing. But Nick and I with our beards and spoon feeding have had the chief parts in this home-made comedy. We have beards because our faces, burned as our hands were, before we could bale out of our Hurricanes, are still too painful for shaving.

Now I leave the partnership. I may be bearded, but I can at least feed myself. The only man who does not come in for some kind of horseplay is Alan. He lies in a bed at the far side of the room. He has had a bad time with his burns.

23

Fighter Boy

In the next bed to me lies John. Sometimes after ‘lights out’ we hold long whispered conversations. Last night we talked of many things — of books, of plays, of aeroplanes, and of the delights of country life. Then he introduced the subject of horses and told me he had a passion for riding, and that he had always had a horse of his own until war started. Since then he had not been able to keep it.

‘But I couldn’t give the game up altogether,’ he said. ‘Every leave I managed somehow to get down to my brother’s farm to borrow an old hack he had turned out to graze.’

Somehow the thought of John talking of riding as he lay there with a stump instead of a leg made me want to change the subject. I asked him what made him want to learn to fly.

He chuckled. ‘I thought flying might be something like riding horses.’

‘And is it?’

‘Yes, but flying is a little more exciting.’

‘You mean it is more dangerous?’

‘So far as I’m concerned it isn’t. You see, my brother’s hack I was telling you about, shied and crushed me against a gate-post when I was riding her on my last leave. And that is why I am here.’

Long after John had gone to sleep I lay awake thinking of what he had told me. The question I had put to him seemed oddly familiar.

Had not someone once asked me that same question?

Then memory took me back four years and to the real beginning of this story.

In those days I was a junior reporter on a Northampton evening paper, and as local news was my business, I was one of the first to hear about the new Air Force Volunteer Reserve School for pilots which had been opened at the municipal airport of Sywell. The opportunity of learning to fly as a member of what was really a Territorial arm of the Royal Air Force was too good to miss.

I sent in my application to the Air Ministry and a week later I was asked to attend for an interview by a Selection Board at Sywell aerodrome.

About twenty others were waiting to see the Selection Board. We were all shown into one waiting room. We were a mixed crowd, 24

Sergeant Pilot Barry Sutton

all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five (this was one of the conditions of entry), and all, I guessed, in jobs. Among the few faces that I recognised was that of a young solicitor who worked in an office next door to mine. We knew each other by sight, and like children meeting at someone else’s party, grinned shyly at each other.

The man sitting opposite me looked like a farmer. I had seen him arrive in his large muddy car which must long ago have lost a more careful owner, and which looked as though it might be pensioned off to a quieter life as a hen-roost before the next licensing quarter began.

In muscular strength he must have equalled any five of the others, but alas, it was obvious that a child in short frocks would have stood more chance of becoming a pilot. He wore glasses, and the lenses were as thick as the bottom of a beer bottle.

At intervals of between five and ten minutes, one of us was led by an orderly in R.A.F. uniform through a door with frosted glass which separated our rooms from the adjoining one in which sat the Selection Board.

Perhaps the man who had just left us is today one of Britain’s heroes. Perhaps it was his face you saw on the front page of your newspaper this morning. You know details of his private life: ‘… P/O Smith, the latest fighter pilot to win the D.F.C., has only two women in his life, his mother and his sister, Mrs Smith told our representative today.’ ‘... Sergeant Pilot Jones, our latest air ace, is engaged to Miss Molly Dash, one of the Glamour Girls currently appearing at the London Casino...’

Perhaps he gets no mention in the papers outside the casualty list.

Perhaps he never went into the Air Force at all, and the last you remember of him was as he passed through that door, giving a final tug at his tie and adjusting for the umpteenth time the handkerchief in the breast-pocket of his best lounge suit.

At last my name was called and I was led into the presence of the Board. Desperately anxious to do the right thing, I adopted what I hoped would be recognised as a ‘brightly intelligent smile’. This did 25

Fighter Boy

not feel very comfortable so I tried another expression — a detached one which was meant to convey that I felt at ease. Lord, I felt silly! I abandoned it as quickly as the first.

Nobody spoke. I was deliberating whether or not I should say ‘Good morning’, or leave it to the President to do so, when he picked up his glasses which had been lying on the table in front of him. He had noticed me for the first time.

‘Good morning,’ he said. Then he asked me the question, ‘Why do you want to fly?’

The tricks of a Selection Board’s President are well known and I was on my guard against them. If I had been asked the weight of a pull-through, or how far a chicken can run into a wood, I should have had the answer off pat, but the direct simplicity of this opening attack was disconcerting. (If only I had had an answer as simple as John’s!)

The one that I gave must have sounded a little threadbare.

My life then as a reporter was a busy one, and although I had only one half-day a week in addition to a weekend consisting of Sunday only, I enjoyed many comparatively slack afternoons during which I could leave the office, so long as the chief reporter knew where to get me on the telephone in case of need.

I would, therefore, be able to spare some time, apart from weekends, to drive over to Sywell which was only a few miles away, so that my training could be more continuous in the important initial stages. This I explained to the Board. I felt it was a good point. The President nodded. It was encouraging.

More questions. Where did I go to school? Had I taken the School Certificate examination? In what subjects had I done best? What did I understand by a sine, cosine, and a tangent? There again I was nearly caught. The truthful answer would have been ‘Nothing’, but I vaguely remembered some definitions. I made a brave show of knowledge with the meaningless phrases a despairing maths master had once branded into my brain for all time. That man had always frightened me and he had never made me understand things. He had only made me learn words. I blessed the memory of him.

26

Sergeant Pilot Barry Sutton

The definitions completely satisfied the President. The interview was ended.

Of course, these apprehensions now sound a little absurd. I had been asked questions about trigonometry, not so much to find out the extent of my academic knowledge as to discover my state of mental alertness and my ability to tackle the unexpected. Though I know this now, if I were to go before a Selection Board today, I would suffer the same agony as I did then. It is because I am afflicted with shyness. That must be the reason why I could not answer with more assurance the first question —‘Why do you want to fly?’

My answer would have entailed some analysis of my mental make-up, some introspection. To do this in front of the President and his colleagues was impossible. I would as soon have taken off my trousers.

Even now I find it difficult to give the true answer.

Perhaps the nearest I can get to it is this. I had always been attracted by mechanical things, and through them I had to some extent satisfied a love of speed which I suppose is inherent in almost every young man. Although I have never been able to afford a fast car (the one I was running at the time had cost me £8), I had driven them, and I had raced motorcycles in a small way. These had been my passion ever since my father had bought me an old 5 ½ h.p. sidevalve Ariel for £4 during my last year at school.

I still think nothing comes so near to the exhilaration of flying a modern fighter machine as the feeling of riding a fast motorcycle. I am no horse-rider, but I am willing to grant John that his comparatively slow sport can be every bit as satisfying. I suppose that the airman, the racing motorist, the motor cyclist, and the horseman all succeed in satisfying the same sense — that of flying through space as part of a live thing, of something which responds sympathetically to each suggestive movement of the hands or body. The airman, though, I knew could do that in another world, his own world of infinite space and boundless beauty.

The medical examination which followed was a lesser ordeal, although it was an incursion into a chamber of mysterious devices 27

Fighter Boy

which, like trained gun-dogs, sought and (almost triumphantly, I suspected) uncovered with inhuman infallibility their quarry of disability or physical unsoundness even in their mildest form.

When next I went to Sywell it was to the Commanding Officer’s office. Here I took the Oath of Allegiance and was given the rank of Sergeant Pilot, although as yet I had never left the ground.

But I had made the niche which was to serve as a strong foothold, a sure leaping-off place, from which when war came two years later, I was able to jump into the vanguard as a ready trained man.

Others, less fortunate, were more rudely flung by conscription into this new world of reality — a world at war.

28

2

TRAINING

‘Air experience…’ I made the entry on the virgin sheet of my logbook in anticipation. Particulars of the flight could be filled in when it had been made.

But with diabolical showmanship, fate conspired with the weather to keep me waiting for the star attraction. The thrill of being accepted as a flying candidate, and the thousand and one lesser excitements such as being fitted for flying clothing, and savouring the passing show of a busy aerodrome from the privileged vantage point of the tarmac instead of through a gap in the hedge or the roof of a car, had to serve as the prelude. Every bit of spare time found me at the aerodrome waiting for the pièce de résistance, the first flight.

I was to receive my initial training as a ‘Nit’, or Ab Initio Pilot, in Tiger Moths, which like most light biplanes are almost as susceptible to the caprices of a gusty wind as small sailing craft, and as every moment I was to spend in the air was to be utilised to the full, I was told that it would be a waste of time for me to be taken up while the lusty nor’easter, which had already blown for a week or more, persisted, for nothing could be more upsetting to a tyro. I chafed under the delay, but Pilot Officer Goldsmith (now F/Lt Goldsmith, A.F.C.), who was to be my instructor, could be no more than sympathetic.

I grew to watch every chimney and smoke-stack for a clue to the strength of the wind and the sign that it had abated a little. after 29

Fighter Boy

a week more of maddening waiting, I fancied I had detected an improvement in the weather. The next day was a Sunday, and as I was not due for my turn of weekend duty at the office, I made off bright and early for Sywell.

But as soon as I rushed through the gates of the aerodrome, I saw that the windsocks were horizontal, looking as though they might have been starched. I had forgotten that what may appear as nothing more than a zephyr sighing along the roof-tops of a town, has a ruder, more boisterous brother out in the country. Goldsmith confirmed my rising doubts. I would not fly that day.

Three days later, on my half-holiday, I again turned up at the aerodrome. This time the weather was perfect. Putting on my parachute unassisted proved too much for me, so there was first the indignity of having it buckled by Goldsmith. It felt fairly comfortable except that the two straps which come between the legs and meet the two shoulder straps at a quick release joint at about the waistline were too short to allow me to stand up straight. I complained of this but was reassured that I had the thing on correctly. If I ever had occasion to use it, said Goldsmith, and the straps were not tight, the result would be disastrous in more ways than one. Both reasons were left to my imagination!

I was helped into the cockpit and strapped in. My parachute fitted into a metal seat shaped rather like a coalscuttle and proved comfortable enough to sit on. A tube connected to earpieces in my helmet was plugged in, and this, together with a rubber mouthpiece which projected over the top of the dashboard, served to give me two-way communication with Goldsmith, whose helmet I could see protruding from the front cockpit.

‘All set?’

His voice came down the speaking tubes with alarming suddenness.

Grasping the rubber mouthpiece, I gave him the affirmative, and when other hands had fixed the catches on the small cut-away door on the side of the fuselage and finally barred the outside world, I realised that for the first time my life was entirely in another man’s hands. The handbrake and the steering wheel, even if he has not 30

Training

driven before, interpret in the simplest way to a passenger in a car the mechanics of motion. Should the driver collapse when the car is travelling at speed, the passenger knows that it would be possible for him with these controls to bring the vehicle to a standstill.

But what if something should happen to Goldsmith while we were in flight? True the machine was fitted with dual control, and I had my full complement of levers and instruments in the back cockpit, but they meant little to me. Acting under the stimulus of mortal danger, my instinct of self-preservation, together with what little I knew about the controls, would probably enable me to keep the machine straight. But unlike a car, or most familiar forms of earthly conveyance, an aeroplane has to be balanced rather like a onewheeled bicycle, laterally and longitudinally, and of course, unlike both car and bicycle, it has to be landed...

Goldsmith shouted to the mechanic who stood, red in the face and panting, by the front of the machine. The wretched man had been trying to start the engine and must have been swinging the propeller for some minutes without response.

‘She’s still a bit weak. Tickle the carburettor,’ yelled Goldsmith.

The unfortunate mechanic did things under the cowling. Again he swung the propeller; again and again and again.

Goldsmith climbed out of his cockpit and consigned the machine to Hell, and then more practically to the Maintenance Hanger. He walked over to my end of the machine: probably with the intention of offering me condolences and perhaps to help me out of my cockpit.

He never got any further than putting his head over the side. His expression changed into something like that of an outraged character

by Bateman and his gloved hand shot out past my face (perhaps his aim was bad) and clutched a large switch on the fuselage beside me.

He flicked it down towards the neat label underneath which bore the words ‘Master Ignition Switch — ON’.

A minute later we were off the ground.

31

3

GOING SOLO

In spite of the original setback of unsuitable weather, I managed to be well through my initial flying training syllabus by the time good flying days with the onset of autumn became shorter and less frequent.

After six weeks, I had finally been able to fill in those blank spaces I had left against ‘Air Experience’ in my logbook. I made another entry. It read: ‘6 October. “This is to certify that I am conversant with the fuel and ignition systems of a Gypsy Engine”.’

I knew it was often the last entry a pilot made before being allowed to go solo. I signed it with a bold flourish.

I was due for another disappointment and this time it was not the fault of the weather. Before being allowed to take up a machine alone for the first time, a pupil must satisfy his instructor, among other things, that he can take off and land smoothly, turn accurately, maintain a constant gliding and climbing speed. I had mastered all this in the course of seven and a half hours’ flying, but there was a snag. On looking through my logbook, my instructor noticed that, by some oversight, I had not been shown how to spin an aircraft. I remonstrated: ‘But you can show me that when I have gone solo.’

It was no use. Goldsmith was adamant.

‘You have been told that coarse handling of the controls can cause a stall, haven’t you? Perhaps you don’t realise that the quickest way 32

Going Solo

to get into a spin is to do the wrong thing at or near the stalling point.’

I had to confess that I had not given the matter much thought. I resigned myself to more dual instruction.

I had, by the way, come to regard instructors as strange men. They rarely smiled, they rarely lost their tempers, and when in the air they spoke, not as most people speak, but in their own language of ‘Patter’.

You know the thing that helps control the aircraft as the ‘stick’, the thing that pulls it through the air, a ‘propeller’, but to the Instructor they are a control column and an airscrew. There is no such thing as a turn to him; it is either a steep, medium, climbing, gliding, stall, or aileron turn. There is, I suppose, a reason for this as there is for all true pedantry. It must be that it is correct and never ambiguous.

We had been climbing steadily for some minutes. Slowly the altimeter needle crept round the dial towards ‘5000 feet’.

‘I’ve got her,’ came The Voice from the front cockpit. I took my feet off the rudder bar and let go the stick. Again The Voice, laconically: ‘We ease back the control column and gently close the throttle…’

The horizon, which had been nestling comfortably roughly halfway between the upper and lower mainplanes, began to recede slowly out of sight below us. I watched the airspeed indicator drop from eighty down through the sixties and, with agonising slowness, towards the fifties. The engine was now throttled back to a mere tick-over. The shriek of the wind in the flying wires dropped to a moan, and then was silent. It was as though we were suspended in a vacuum. The silence was again broken by The Voice.

‘We now kick on full rudder and pull back the control column.’

The machine writhed like a tortured animal. The nose slowly described a parabola towards the horizon, which now came up to meet us perpendicularly, like a huge black wave. Then, with breathtaking suddenness, we plunged vertically down, and sickeningly, a dwarfed and curiously foreshortened haystack and clump of trees, a couple of miles below us, began to revolve, their separate and distinct shapes merging into one, like the dark parts on the label of a rotating gramophone record.

33

Fighter Boy

Imperturbably The Voice droned on, ‘I am going to increase the rate of rotation. Observe...’

This was too much. I had suddenly felt sick and breathless. I closed my eyes and dropped my head on to my chest until I felt the stick move violently forward. Looking cautiously over the side, I saw that we were still plunging headlong towards the ground. Gradually, I felt a firm pressure on my bottom and feet and I knew that we were coming out of the dive.

The wires began their song again and I felt the beat of the motor as the horizon once more crept up under the nose of the machine.

The Voice asked me something, unintelligibly. I found that I had not enough breath to ask it to repeat itself.

Back in the crew room, for the first time after a flight, I had to refuse a cigarette.

I was due for still more dual instruction. I had to learn how to spin myself and how to recover, and in spite of my first impressions I grew to enjoy the sensation of this new manoeuvre.

One afternoon, after I had been practising spinning, we still had some time to spare before my allotted thirty minutes expired, and I was told to practise a few landings.

Now flying in this respect is rather like golf. Yesterday you thought you could not do a thing wrong, but today you cannot do a thing right.

Up to this time I had been secretly pleased with my progress. I had learned with reasonable proficiency all that I had been shown, including the nice art of putting down a three-point landing fairly consistently, but today I tried three landings and they were all bad.

On the last one I had held off too high, with the result that the wretched Tiger Moth’s undercarriage, generally impervious to the shock of the worst of bad landings, was tested to the full. Only with the greatest of difficulty could the poor old lady have so gamely risen from her knees, I remember thinking. The instructor clambered out of the cockpit and walked round to the front of the machine and examined the undercarriage for damage.

‘By the Grace of God you haven’t broken anything’ he shouted up to me. He fumbled in the front cockpit for a moment. He then 34

Going Solo

stood on the ground again by the machine. He slid open his zipp fasteners in his flying suit and extracted his pipe from his pocket.

I put my head over the side of the cockpit and cocked my thumb questioningly towards the tarmac. Was I to taxi in without him?

He shook his head and pointed towards the downwind side of the airfield and then to the sky. Finally, he made a gesture as though shooing a cat.

He could only mean one thing. I was to go solo. I had not realised that a pupil is rarely sent off solo straight from the tarmac but that the surprise is ‘sprung’ on him when his instructor considers the time ripe.

That flight to me, of course, is memorable, and the impression of it that has stuck in my mind as much as anything else, was almost exactly the one I have remembered about the first time I rode my fairy cycle. The exhilaration of the moment was overshadowed a little by the question of how it was all going to end. Could I return to earth gracefully?

I held the machine down a little as soon as the ground slid from under the wheels, and when the speed had risen to one at which I could safely climb, eased back the stick (this was my machine now. There was no longer anyone in front talking about ‘control columns’). At about 500 feet I levelled off and made a gentle turn on the circuit which was to bring me back to the down-wind side of the aerodrome for the landing.

Coming in to land on my own for the first time was the supreme thrill.

Close to the ground one gets a true idea of speed. The ground, which had until now been slipping underneath leisurely enough, now began to race past like water through opening sluice-gates. Back with the stick slightly and then the sensation of driving in a very fast car on the smoothest of roads, for the machine is still airborne.

Bump!… a brief silence… then another bump, but a softer one this time, and followed by the rumble of the tailskid on the grass. The adventure was over and the landing was safe.

I taxied in and walked into the instructor’s Flight Office to earn my pat on the back. I asked why I had been given my chance after such a gaffe as my previous landing.

35

Fighter Boy

‘That’s easy,’ said the owner of The Voice, the man with the Buster Keaton face, the humorist.

‘After that landing, I decided that if, after all I have told you, you were still going to make a habit of pulling back the control column like a barmaid drawing a pint of beer, you had better do it without me in the front seat.’

36

4

MOVE TO NOTTINGHAM

In the columns of the Daily Telegraph a month before, I had seen an advertisement by the Nottingham Journal for a junior reporter. Now the scale of a reporter’s wages is governed to some extent by the size of the town in which he works. Northampton had a population of roughly 100,000; Nottingham over a quarter of a million. Apart from mercenary considerations, there was another good reason why I looked upon the opportunity of changing my job as a good one. I needed fresh experience in new surroundings. I made enquiries and found that there was a newly formed Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve School at Tollerton, which was only some ten minutes in a car from the centre of Nottingham. Providing my new editor would show the same consideration as my present one did, there was no reason why I should not continue my flying training there in the same way as I had at SywelI. I applied for the job and sent a few specimen cuttings of my work.

After three weeks of waiting, I had not received so much as an acknowledgment of my letter, so I decided it was my turn to take the initiative. Managing to get a full day off by forgoing the half-day of the previous week, I put on my best suit and drove to Nottingham.

It rained steadily all day, and in my old two-seater Austin Seven with its leaky roof I made an uncomfortable journey. By the time I arrived in the middle of the afternoon, I felt dirty, ruffled, and in no state to interview a prospective employer, but after a wash and tea in 37

Fighter Boy

a cafe belonging to a cinema adjoining the Journal office, I felt in a more confident frame of mind.

The editor of a newspaper is not easily approached and I was prepared for difficulties, particularly as I had no credentials beyond the letter which I had sent and my own visiting card, bearing the name of my present paper. But luck was with me and I was shown up to his office after only a short delay.

I was given a good hearing and was subjected to a lengthy cross-examination. The editor explained that he had not read my application and indicated a pile of letters which lay in the corner of the room.

‘I am afraid it will have to take its turn,’ he said. ‘So far, I have one hundred and eleven applications to consider...’ So much for my socalled initiative! I might just as well have waited my turn. So much for my carefully worded letter!

The weather was in keeping with my mood as I drove back. It rained in torrents. By the time I had been driving for half an hour, the water penetrated the car’s bonnet and I had to chug along on three cylinders. I stopped, but found that it was too wet to try and effect any repairs. I decided to struggle on until I came to a garage.

I found one on the Six Hills Road and pulled into it. The trouble, as I had suspected, was water on the plug leads.

While this was being fixed, I disentangled myself from my seat and lit a cigarette. At least I could do this in the dry, so I walked into the garage. Just inside the entrance, as though it had only recently been brought in, stood a powerful saloon. Its roof and windscreen had been smashed out of shape, and wet mud and grass still clung to its door handles.

‘Brought in this afternoon: driver came off even worse,’ the garage man explained laconically. He could tell me no more beyond the fact that an A.A. man had telephoned from his box two miles down the road and asked for a breakdown lorry with a block and tackle.

As soon as my car was ready, I drove off in search of the A.A. box, but I didn’t get as far as that. Broken glass and oil told their story at the next crossroads. A few yards up one of the side roads, the A.A. 38

Move to Nottingham

patrol man, who I guessed had telephoned the garage, stood talking to a policeman. On the grass verge lay the remains of a lorry.

I got little satisfaction from the policeman. Your country bobby is by nature a reticent being, so far as the newspaper man is concerned, and unless you know him personally, you are lucky if you get him to admit the fundamental and obvious fact that an accident has happened, even if he is standing neck-high in the wreckage. I waited until he had ďŹ nished his business and had ridden off on his bicycle, and then approached the A.A. man.

He told me enough to send me back again to the garage, where I used a telephone to call up all the Leicester hospitals (the A.A. man had not been able to tell me more about the injured driver of the car, except that he had been taken off to Leicester by a passing motorist).

At last I learned the name of the injured man and the fact that he was critically ill.

I was able to give the Journal the story in time for the late afternoon editions. As news, of course, it was not very important, but as a means of exploiting a little timely salesmanship on my own behalf it was extremely valuable.

A few days later I received a letter accepting my application for the job.

39

5

VOLUNTEER RESERVE

When they wrote the guidebooks eulogising Nottingham and its amenities, they forgot one thing — the fact that it is considered to be a place well worth living in by its own inhabitants.

Ask a Nottingham man what he thinks of his native city, and he will tell you that it is a grand place — lavish praise indeed when one considers that cities generally seem to suffer in the same way as did the prophets of old in the matter of earning praise at home.

Says the visitor to other towns and cities: ‘I wish I could live here all the year round.’ Whereat the inhabitant, who has the misfortune to do so and is all too conscious of it, replies: ‘You would soon get tired of it. You don’t know how lucky you are to live at so-and-so.’

Tell a Nottingham man he is lucky to live in Nottingham, however, and he will in all probability agree with you. He may not know why, but that is beside the point. The essential fact is that he likes Nottingham, and the inference is that Nottingham has something, perhaps subtle, to commend it.

To me, though, the charm of the ‘Queen of the Midlands’, as it is sometimes called, was a tangible thing. I met there the girl who was to become my wife a year later, and I made many good friends. I enjoyed my new job on the Journal, and as at Northampton, I found enough time to continue my flying training, So far as Nottingham was concerned, the R.A.F.V.R. was a comparatively new thing. It was only three months before my arrival 40

Volunteer Reserve

that the Air Ministry had rented Tollerton aerodrome from the Nottingham Flying Club, erected additional hangars and buildings.

Here ab initio instruction was given on Miles Magisters, which have largely superseded the Tiger Moth, but as I had already done some fifty hours on the bigger Hawker Hart aircraft, I only flew a Magister a few times by way of a change. To us the Hart and its supercharged brothers, the Hind and Audax, seemed huge machines with their 850 h.p. Rolls-Royce Kestrel engines and their wingspan of 37 feet. It has always seemed to me that these machines capture the pure joy of flying in a way which no other of the many Service types can.

The Chief Flying Instructor was Flight-Lieutenant West, who had served out East in the regular Air Force. I first met him at Sywell where he was instructing on Tigers, and he gave me my first introduction to aerobatics there. My own instructor was ‘Jock’ Bonner, now a test pilot. He had had a long and interesting flying career and was at one time a member of Alan Cobham’s Air Circus. He is the only man I have met in the R.A.F. who wears a ribbon above the right breast pocket of his tunic. It is a distinction belonging to those who have won the Royal Humane Society medal. Jock got this award some years before, for pulling a man out of the wreckage of a blazing machine.

By far the most experienced man on the Tollerton staff of flying instructors was a broad-shouldered and genial Flight-Sergeant named Kirlew. He had had some twenty five years of flying, and was one of the few men I have known who could afford to handle a machine with contempt. Kirlew used to relax from the strictly correct way of flying only on those occasions when he was alone in a machine.

The sight of him doing those terrifying rocket loops and slow rolls at only a few hundred feet, while flight testing a machine, used to thrill us all.

One of the most colourful of all Tollerton personalities was a non-flying member of the staff, George Hunter. George, though he did not fly, lived for aeroplanes. As a clerk on the Administrative staff, he recorded the flying times and progress of us pupils on a huge blackboard in his office, and generally kept a fatherly eye on 41

Fighter Boy

everyone. He applied for a pilotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s course in the R.A.F.V.R. but was rejected on the grounds of his being just over the maximum age. It must have been a great disappointment for him. On the outbreak of war, however, he succeeded in becoming an Air Gunner, and the last I heard of him was that he was taken prisoner in Germany after a bombing raid.

42

6

R.A.F.

Up to now there had been little that was military about the training of the Volunteer Reserve, but the time came when we were to be taught drill by a sergeant in the Guards. Instead of sitting around on the tarmac criticising one another’s landings, we now spent the time when we were not flying on the car park at the back of the hangars, which was our parade-ground.

In future, while at the aerodrome, we were to wear sergeant’s uniform instead of R.A.F. blazers. It is probable that none of us could explain why, but I remember we all treated this as a sort of joke. A uniform in those days was something of a curiosity, and I remember somewhat self-consciously trying mine on in the privacy of my bedroom. Few of us realised then how imminent was the catastrophe of war, although the papers brought to us, almost daily, news of fresh, disturbing developments from the Continent.

Then in September 1938 came the crisis of crises — Munich.

More than once we in the Volunteer Reserve were told we might be mobilised at a moment’s notice. But, miraculously, the storm-clouds dispersed and a new-old phrase was on everyone’s lips – ‘Peace with Honour’.

But some of us had seen the writing on the wall.

Early in the following New Year I decided to give up my job and apply for a short service-commission in the regular Air Force.

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Fighter Boy

With my application I enclosed a recommendation from my Commanding Officer. After a wait of two or three weeks I received a short note from the Air Ministry requesting me to attend for an interview before the Selection Board at Adastral House, Kingsway.

This time the agony of waiting for the result was more lingering.

Some weeks elapsed before I received news that I had been successful, when I also received a notification to report in a week’s time at Uxbridge for a disciplinary course. There was the consoling fact that this time I was not required to undergo a medical examination.

And so to the Royal Air Force Depot, Uxbridge...

Early morning P.T. (at least an appetite for breakfast)... Drill... (must one always do it on gravel?)... Lectures (Air Force Law, K.R.’s, Service Conventions don’t call it ‘Raf’!)… How to build latrines in the desert… Guest nights (what if one’s Mess trousers really did split?)…

P.T., drill, lectures, guest nights: guest nights, lectures, drill, P.T. We were only thirty-five minutes by tube from the West End, but the only time we went there was to the tailor for a fitting of our uniforms (how bare they looked without any adornment except for the Pilot Officer’s thin stripe).

So the routine went on inexorably all through the whirlwind fortnight. But I was enjoying myself.

There was that languorous half-hour spent lying in the bath before dressing for dinner. Basking in the luxury of the moment, I recalled the frenzy of my civil life preprandial preparations. Then I was in for a heavy evening listening to the sonorous burblings of people who meant little more than names on a toast list; now the evening held the prospect of pleasure instead of work. It was delightful.

And then, there were the new friendships I was making. Most of my companions on the course knew each other. They had started their initial flying training at a Civil School in Scotland, and had lived and worked together for three months. So far as I knew, I was the only one who had done my training elsewhere, but soon I began to feel that I had known everyone for far longer than only a few days.

44

R.A.F.

We were quartered two in a room. Sharing mine was a Scottish boy who had lived most of his life in Shanghai. During the time we spent together at Uxbridge, and later at Flying Training School, we became very friendly, but as so often was the case, we lost touch when the time came for us to be posted to squadrons. The last I heard of him was that he had been killed in action.

There were over eighty of us on the same course at Uxbridge. But since those days I have met fewer than half a dozen of them in my numerous visits to aerodromes. This has brought home to me more graphically than figures could the size of the Air Force. More than one of those I have met since have had thrilling stories to tell of their adventures since the outbreak of war.

One of whom I met in hospital last summer, had cracked his spine and broken an ankle following a jump in a damaged parachute, and another, still in his teens whom I also met in hospital, had had his nerve so shaken after a crash landing in a Lysander in France that he was told he would never fly again.

It was not until the time came for us to leave Uxbridge that we realised fully, for the first time, how we had become something more than mere individuals.

We were told that before we could get permission to travel to Flying Training School in our cars we would be required to be covered by Comprehensive Insurance as we were undertaking a journey while on duty. As I had only Third Party insurance, I had to arrange to pay the extra for full cover for that journey. Strange how valuable one could become in a fortnight!

Half of the eighty on the course at Uxbridge were posted to one Flying Training School and half to another some fifteen miles away. I was to go to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

I was going to a place to begin a new life only a few miles from where, in a tiny village called Wilcote I had first begun it.

At Uxbridge it had been a hard life, but we had lived in comfort.

(I still regard that Mess as the most comfortable I have ever been in.) But at Brize Norton, life, though not so hard from the point of view of discipline, was going to be earnest. Here, wooden huts 45

Fighter Boy

served for the Mess and sleeping quarters, and these, instead of being surrounded by neat flowerbeds and lawns, were set, on first impressions, on an island of wet clay. For the camp was still in the hands of the builders, and men hammered, dug, sawed, and careered about in dilapidated lorries, with the frenzy born of a large contract be completed in a short time.

The aerodrome itself appeared to have been well established. The airfield was large and left nothing to be desired.

One by one we were interviewed by the C.O. of the station, who told us that if we worked hard our stay would be a happy one. If we did not, he assured us, he would do his utmost to make it otherwise.

By the time we had finished our course of six months, three months in the Initial Training School and the remainder in the Advanced Training School, we would have our wings and would be fully trained to take our place in the Service proper.

After being shown our rooms, we trooped in to the ‘Education Block’ — a self-conscious collection of wooden huts for a talk by the Chief Ground Instructor. He made himself even plainer than the C.O. His first sentence was: ‘You are officers, but don’t get the idea that you are the Almighty.’

We were there to work hard, we would get no leave except for an occasional ‘short’ weekend, and if we had cars, we were to keep them off the camp. Our time would be divided, so far as possible, between flying and lectures.

We took this as a good omen. If ‘divided’ were the operative word, then we would at least get plenty of flying, for we were each given twenty-three textbooks.

There were pleasant surprises in store for me. I was to be trained as a fighter pilot and transferred to the Advanced Training Course, where I would take my place among those who had already done their three months’ training on the Junior Course and were now flying more advanced types. This was because I had already done some eighty hours solo, flying on Harts and Hinds, which were, with minor differences, similar machines to the Audax, which as an embryo fighter pilot I would have flown in the Junior Course. Now I would fly the Fury.

46

R.A.F.

This was something quite new to me. Although at that time there were some Fury squadrons, they were being superseded by Hurricanes and, to a lesser extent, by Spitfires. Thus, I could claim to be training on what was still a frontline fighter. And what fun Furies proved to be!

If Harts and Hinds captured the joy of flying, Furies captured the exhilaration of it. The changeover was like driving a genuine sports car after a tourer. The maximum speed of our Furies did not exceed 230 m.p.h., but figures are an inadequate symbol to express speed and the joy of it.

The Fury had some strange tricks.

Sometimes we would be tempted to congratulate ourselves on a smooth touchdown (the Fury had an extremely resilient undercarriage, so that this was not difficult) and a dead-straight landing run, when — swoosh! — for no reason at all, we would find ourselves facing the way from which we had come.

No, the Fury on the ground was right out of its element.

If being on Senior Course meant that I flew Furies, could have more leave, could keep my car on the camp, and generally sat at a higher table, it also meant that I had the dubious distinction of being the only member who was not yet qualified to wear wings.

This was because I had not passed through Junior Team, digested a large part of the contents of those twenty-three textbooks, and attended many hours of lectures. So I had to swot for my privileges.

After about two months of rough-and-ready self-teaching and an occasional lecture, when I would join my old comrades, I told the Chief Ground Instructor that I considered I had learnt enough to sit the examination. (In addition to passing out in flying, a candidate has to obtain passes in written papers on Airmanship, Navigation, Armament, Law and Discipline, Airframes and Rigging, Engines, Meteorology, Organisation of the R.A.F. There were also oral examinations in some of these subjects. The aggregate required for a pass was 60 per cent). A failure, he told me, reflected to some extent on the Flying Training School, and to some extent on him personally, so he would give me a preliminary examination before allowing me 47

Fighter Boy

to sit the official papers. The result of this was that I was told to learn some more and submit myself to another examination in a fortnight’s time. This I did, and that time was told with luck I would get through. The following week I was temporarily posted to No. 3 F.T.S. at South Cerney in Gloucestershire, to sit the examination there, together with the Junior Course on that station.

In spite of my stay there being a short one and necessarily having little time for relaxation, I did manage to enjoy myself. The Mess was full, so I lived out in comfort at a hotel in Cirencester, which was only a few minutes by car from the aerodrome. In fact, I must have been too comfortable. I committed the heinous offence of oversleeping one morning and arriving three-quarters of an hour late for my examination in Rigging. I had to write my paper in what time remained. I later received the worst haranguing I have ever had from the Station Adjutant, who at the best of times, I was told, was a liverish soul.

At South Cerney I made many of those sketchy friendships which one so often makes in the R.A.F. during one’s peregrinations, but out of that new community of some forty officers I have, as in the case of those at Brize Norton, since met only one or two. One of them, a most likeable and charming man of about my own age, whose name was Craig-Adams, met his end during the campaign in Norway. Although shot and seriously wounded, he deliberately rammed the German machine which had attacked him.

Soon after my return to Brize Norton, I left, together with the rest of the Senior Term, for a month’s course at Armament Practice Camp. This was held at Warmwell, in Dorset. It was the final phase of our flying training and it proved to be the most enjoyable.

Chesil beaches, the strip of coastline upon which we were to do part of our firing practices at ground targets, had an ugly record.

Fatal accidents, caused mostly through pilots pulling out of the dive too late and hitting the beach, were reputed to average one a month. During our stay there were no fatalities on the beach itself, but unfortunately, one of two Iraki pilots training with us hit the 48

R.A.F.

tow-rope of the drogue (A target shaped rather like a windsock and towed behind an aircraft) and crashed into the sea.

It was at Warmwell that I received the joyous news that I had passed my Wings examination. The Rigging paper I had passed by one mark!

Warmwell over, we returned to Brize Norton for the remaining few weeks of our course.

We did no more flying or ground training, or what we had originally meant by that word. Now we were to have hours of a new kind of ground training — parade-ground training. The climax of the course was to be the Passing-out Parade and inspection by the Air Officer commanding our group, and in preparation for this we were drilled even more stringently than we were at Uxbridge. Marching, fixing and unfixing bayonets, and many other complicated parade-ground manoeuvres were practised for hours at a stretch until it seemed that our shoulders and right arms would never be the same again after holding those rifles with bayonets fixed for such a long, exhausting time.

The march-past and other ceremonials of the Great Day seemed to us most impressive. Everything, we felt sure, had gone with a swing.

We had never marched better, never performed our drill with greater precision. Even the band, which during our practices had come in for strong criticism, had acquitted itself nobly.

With confidence we faced the report of the A.O.C. on our efforts that day, as we waited in the Mess after tea for his address.

But we were surprised to get more kicks than ha’pence. We were told that as a course our work during the term had been average, both so far as flying and ground subjects were concerned. Our discipline had been ‘average’ — everything had been ‘average’. We hung on the A.O.C.’s words as he turned to our parade that day.

He would surely alter his tone in reference to that. It was obvious that we had been a success, for even our Drill Sergeant, it was said, had unbent so far as to admit, grudgingly, that we ‘hadn’t been so dusty’. But against the final criticism our self-satisfaction collapsed like a pricked balloon. Our bearing on parade had been 49

Fighter Boy

‘satisfactory’ but our arms drill and marching had at times been ‘ragged’.

I do not suppose that the A.O.C. was a hard man or hypercritical.

I think he considered it his job to judge things by an abnormally high standard. Afterwards, we were introduced to him personally and we all agreed he was charming.

The whole affair made a profound impression on me. The lesson stuck out a mile. In the Service there was obviously no time for flattery which in civil life would go under the more comfortable label of ‘politeness’.

50

7

56 SQUADRON, NORTH WEALD

One of the best synopses of the history of No. 56 Squadron appeared some time ago on the obverse of a cigarette card, part of a series which reproduced the crests of R.A.F. Squadrons.

With acknowledgments to Messrs. Player, I will quote it: Founded in June 1916, the squadron went overseas in the following April.

Arriving in France at a time when the German Air Force was making a strong bid for supremacy, No. 56 soon established itself in the forefront of fighter squadrons. Most feared by the enemy, its history is one of brilliant records of achievement, and many of the greatest British Air Fighters of the war learnt their technique while serving with No. 56. Returning to England in 1919, the squadron was disbanded in January 1920. In the following month, No. 80 Squadron in Egypt was redesignated, to No. 56.

The squadron is now located at North Weald, Essex.

When I was first told that I would be posted to 56, which was a Hurricane squadron, I must confess that the full extent of my good fortune was lost on me, and my first question was ‘Where is North Weald, anyway?’

Someone told me it was in Essex, and I remember being disappointed at not finding it on the large road map of England which hung on the wall of the Mess entrance hall. It surely could not be a very important place. I viewed the prospect of going there with a certain amount of misgiving.

51

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This mood perhaps made the surprise all the more pleasant when I did arrive at my new station.

My first job on arrival was to report to the Adjutant, to the Station Commander, and to my own C.O. I found them all together in the Adjutant’s office.

At Brize Norton I had been told that on arrival at a new station one could expect fourteen days’ leave just for the asking. The formalities and introductions over, I popped the question.

The effect was startling. There were hoots of laughter.

Far from getting leave, I was made Station Orderly Officer on every alternate day for a fortnight. I often wondered whether this was a mere coincidence.

There was a slight consolation. My name went up on Daily Routine Orders as. ‘Pilot Officer’ Sutton. I was still an ‘Acting Pilot Officer’, but the rank was unofficially non est so far as an operational station was concerned. I was now to live amongst the élite, and I was glad of any pretext upon which to expel an outsize inferiority complex, which automatically accompanies any new and very junior member of any squadron.

Esprit de corps is a loose phrase, the misuse of which has at some time or other caused misapprehension and even bad feeling, and I use it reservedly. But I think that this excellent quality, innocent as it was in the case of most squadrons of the R.A.F. of any of the more sinister implications of ‘class-consciousness’ or ‘exclusiveness’, was one of the things that first impressed me on joining 56. Every officer knew that he belonged to a squadron which was famous, and he took an honest pride in this fact.

My Flight Commander, I found, was a man of nearly 600 hours’ flying experience, while the most junior Pilot Officer in the squadron had nearly twice as many hours to his credit as I, so here again was another excellent reason why, as all ‘new’ boys do of their own accord, or are made to do, I kept my place.

There were two other squadrons, Nos. 17 and 151, based at North Weald. The former had arrived only a few days before from Kenley and occupied wooden huts for their squadron offices, and kept 52

56 Squadron, North Weald

their aircraft in a temporary hangar. No. 151, like 56, were more established at North Weald; although they had not been based there for as long as the former, they had come to regard ‘The Weald’, as it was affectionately known, as their home.

Poor 17 Squadron never had a chance to settle down anywhere.

From Kenley they went to North Weald and subsequently from North Weald to Croydon, from Croydon to Debden, from Debden to Martlesham, and from Martlesham to France, from France to Jersey, (Had I known that they were going to Jersey — although actually I believe they were there only a few days — I would have got in touch with someone in the squadron and asked him to pass on a message to my people. When the German occupation came a few days later, 17 were withdrawn and communication with the island naturally ceased, My family, unfortunately, failed to get away) all within the space of some eighteen months. I do not know where they are now. I would not be in the least surprised if they are out East or even with the B.E.F. in Iceland.

Life during those first few weeks at North Weald was for me an easy one — a little too easy for my liking. The peacetime life of any pilot in the R.A.F. was far from arduous, but so far I could hardly be said to be even a flying member of my squadron, for I had not yet been allowed to try my hand at flying a Hurricane.

Our day at North Weald started with a working parade on the station parade-ground at 8.30, where officers and men of all three squadrons assembled before marching to work. Most of the morning was taken up with routine inspections of aircraft and there was little flying done before lunch, which was taken at 12.30. Occasionally we had a ‘Lunch Day’, a special institution which enabled pilots to travel to any other aerodrome in the country on the pretext of a routine cross-country practice flight, but which was, in reality, a social call.

Most of the flying during the day consisted of interceptions, attacks with one flight simulating a force of bombers, and formation flying.

This was practised over and over again. Proficiency at formation flying entails a vast amount of practice and is one of the hallmarks of the good pilot.

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Fighter Boy

Although many other squadrons had had Hurricanes for a year or more, they were still something of a novelty. All squadrons at North Weald had been flying them for some time, but the pilots, however much they enjoyed flying these wonderful new machines, still cherished memories of the immortal Gloster Gladiator which the Hurricane had largely superseded as a front-line fighter.

Indeed, for several months after I had arrived, by which time the squadron had been re-equipped with Hurricanes for nearly a year, a Gladiator stood in the main hangar, aloof in a corner. It was unserviceable for many reasons, not the least of which was the absence of a control column, but there it was allowed to remain, like a pensioned-off retainer.

Between 56 and 151 there was an intense spirit of rivalry. The latter complained, perhaps with some justification, that 56 thought a little too much of itself. Whether or not the charge was justified, the fact remained that in many ways we were inclined to be faintly patronising.

Each squadron tried to assert its superiority in a number of ways. For instance, one day 151 would stage a practice formation flight of six machines designed to end spectacularly over the Mess (where it could not fail to be appreciated to the full) in an impressive breakaway with each machine ‘peeling off’ in tight formation.

The next day, 56 would attempt an even more elaborate demonstration with the whole squadron. Flying in still tighter formation, they would break away in sections, each section leader performing a neat loop while the outside men pulled up in stall turns to either side.

Little comment was made in the Mess on these displays. The whole business of rivalry was invested with dignity and decorum. We made no bones, however, about referring to 151 as ‘The One Hundred and Fifty Worst’. It was the nearest either squadron ever came to calling each other names.

In the Mess we made a great show of our silver, and a fine display we certainly had. Apart from twenty or thirty tankards inscribed and given by past and present members of the squadron, there were 54

56 Squadron, North Weald

trophies from the last war. The whole collection was on view only on such grand occasions as a dance or cocktail party.

The most prized possession of all was a glass case containing the tunic and gloves of the illustrious Albert Ball, who, together with McCudden and Maxwell, was a one-time member of the squadron.

As I have indicated, Hurricanes and their type were still something of a novelty to flying personnel, but to those older officers who had flown nothing since the heyday of, say, the Bulldog, they were ‘infernal’ machines. The Station Commander, a Group Captain in his fifties, who probably had not taken the air since the Armistice, saw to it that young pilots, with no experience on monoplanes, were made to be thoroughly conversant with the alleged new technique of flying these Hurricanes.

Flaps and undercarriages were, of course, new to those who, like myself, had never flown anything more advanced than a Hind or Fury, Bearing this in mind, the Station Commander ordered that, before flying a Hurricane for the first time, a pilot was to make himself thoroughly conversant with the flaps and undercarriage controls.

Very proper. But there was another condition. The unfortunate pilot was, in addition: ‘On ten different occasions, on different days, to raise and lower the undercarriage and flaps on a machine jacked up on trestles, to the satisfaction of the Flight Commander’.

Furthermore, he was to obtain a written record of these performances, bearing dates, and was to sign in his logbook a statement to the effect that he thoroughly understood the working of these controls.

The rest of the flight, I suspected, were just as pleased as I when I had qualified to try my hand at flying a Hurricane, for a first solo on a new type is always an event considered worth watching, I have never seen any mishap on flights such as these, but they still remain an attraction.

My first flight passed off successfully, but I was glad when I had made my landing. The Hurricane had proved to be all I had expected of it. Never have I flown anything which inspired so much confidence.

To fly with a roof over my head was in itself a new experience, and 55

Fighter Boy

though it was partly due to this that I was disappointed at the little sensation felt, I enjoyed flying at what to me had hitherto been unknown speeds, I appreciated the comfort of it. But the roof is a sliding one, and most pilots, like myself, prefer to fly with it open.

I have written of North Weald and the way of life there during those last few months of peace, but what of my companions: the officers and men with whom I worked and played and later fought, whose personal triumphs and tragedies became almost a part of my own life? This was, I suppose, because we shared common experiences and dangers, and as with any other body of men thrown together in such circumstances, our destinies seemed somehow to be inextricably interwoven.

Some lived to be acclaimed heroes by their country, others have gone.

As I write this, after eighteen months of war (March 1941, when Barry was in hospital at Torquay) 56 has for various reasons been almost completely re-stocked with pilots, but the names of those whose privilege it was at the outbreak of war to carry on the proud war record of their squadron twenty-three years after the last struggle must not be forgotten.

Let me first introduce them as I knew them. Their adventures form part of the story of this book and emerge in due course.

The Commanding Officer, S/Ldr Knowles, known as ‘Teddy’ to his contemporaries, and as the ‘Fuehrer’ to us, was a strong, silent man of the type so often seen pacing the bridge in a film drama of the sea.

Off duty in the Mess, he was a very different man. It was said he was a Bachelor of Music but he only revealed his talent occasionally, and then to the extent merely of beating out a soulful rendering on the piano of Khyber Blues, a robust adaptation of the sentimental Irish ballad A Little Bit of Heaven, composed by R.A.F. troops stationed in one of the farthest-flung outposts of the Empire. These performances generally took place when we had all dined well and were able to extract, in chorus, the full pathos of this lament.

Although a strict disciplinarian, S/Ldr Knowles hated red tape. No one could have studied more closely the interests of his pilots. He was one of the few men I have met, certainly the only one I have 56

56 Squadron, North Weald

served under, who could be said to be both feared and admired by their subordinates. When the time came for him to be posted to other more important duties in the Service, all of us, and particularly those who had served under him during those first difficult months of war, felt rather like children who had lost their guardian.

Next in seniority came F/Lt Joslin, who commanded ‘A’ Flight, of which I was a member. He was a large man, with ginger hair and a ginger temperament. He drank enormous quantities of beer with no apparent effect, had a huge laugh, a charming wife, a spaniel, but never any cigarettes. He was killed in action last year, during the first week of his command of 79 Squadron.

The rest of ‘A’ Flight was composed of F/O Roger Morewood, F/O Richard (‘Klondyke’ or just plain ‘Klon’) Coe, and P/O’s ‘Fish’ Fisher, ‘Boy’ Brooker, Wicks, Harris, and myself.

Roger Morewood and his wife, Clare, were extremely popular with everyone at North Weald. He sported a large pipe, a magnificent ‘handlebars’ moustache, and a perpetual grin, and was undoubtedly the best-natured man on the station. One of the major sorrows in his life came some six months after I first arrived, when he was posted to a Blenheim squadron which was then based in Scotland.

Later I met him while on leave in London.

‘How’s tricks?’ I asked him.

‘Rotten!’ said Roger. ‘Nothing but convoy patrols the whole day long and no excitement at all.’

‘What about Blenheims — how do you like them?’

Roger’s upbringing as a single-seater fighter pilot was even more deeply ingrained than I had imagined.

He quivered to the very tips of his moustache.

‘I don’t! It’s no better than driving a lorry. Even the bloody steering wheel is on the wrong side!’

Richard Coe was an amiable, quiet Canadian whose passion was things mechanical. His bedroom, which he had fitted up with all manner of wireless and electrical gadgets, claimed most of his time off duty. No one asked him to explain the mysteries of his pets. No one could have possibly understood them.

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The squadron had the usual collection of cars in various stages of decrepitude, and it was a safe bet that if Richard could not repair any mechanical failure, the garage down the road was in for a tricky job. At last he sold the ancient Norton motorcycle which he had hotted up sufficiently to be summoned for exceeding 80 m.p.h. on the Epping road (‘just seeing what it would do’) and bought a car.

And what a car it was! We instantly christened it ‘The Barouche’, and that, I think, is the best description of it. It was an ancient Renault a huge box of a car with a bonnet like a Paris taxicab. Much to Richard’s disgust, we howled with mirth when it first made its appearance on the station. His first modification was to turn on it the spray which was being used to camouflage sandbags with a muddy green. This, at any rate, was preferable to its original colour, which Fords, I believe, used to call ‘Arabian Sand’, but in the case of the Renault was more like that of old porcelain. He did the job with more thoroughness than skill. Finding that the nose of the spray was not designed for such delicate work and that he had inadvertently directed some paint on the windows as well as the body, he decided that all the windows except the windscreen should be painted.

By the time he had finished, the wretched Renault looked more sinister than hideous. But that car went everywhere and never once faltered.

Another modification he carried out was to adapt the carburettor to run on paraffin. Petrol was expensive and the idea was to fill the main tank with paraffin and use a small auxiliary tank filled with petrol for starting only. He had to abandon it for various reasons, not the least of which was the additional unwelcome attention the Renault attracted on account of frequent loud backfiring with belching of flames and black smoke. It must have been the poor old thing’s conscience, for we found out later that the practice of running a motorcar on paraffin is illegal.

Fisher, a dark-haired, good-looking New Zealander, was the only other colonial in the squadron besides Coe. He had completed his training in his home country and had joined 56 soon after his arrival in England.

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We were involved together in an embarrassing incident not long after my arrival at North Weald. He was leading me in some cloud formation practice, when on emerging from a lump of black cumulus we found ourselves in the middle of the newly-erected balloon barrage over the Estuary. How we had come so far without hitting anything, still more, how we extricated ourselves safely with balloons on all sides will forever remain a mystery.

Wicks and Brooker, except for myself, were the most junior officers in the flight and were naturally the most inexperienced pilots, although both had done considerably more flying on Hurricanes than I had done.

Wicks, son of a Wiltshire parson, was a lanky six-footer with huge feet but the nimblest of hands. This probably accounted for the fact that he was a particularly good aerobatic pilot, as well as a fine pianist.

We used to get a lot of fun out of Wicks’ feet, and I remember one of our biggest laughs at his (or their) expense was several months later when three of us drove down to the aerodrome from the Mess in Joslin’s car. It was very early in the morning and we were due to patrol a convoy off Harwich in half an hour’s time. We piled into the car and prepared to drive off, but Joslin, in the driver’s seat, found that for some reason his door would not shut. At last he had to get out and make a thorough investigation. He soon found the cause of the trouble. It was one of Wicks’ feet. He had dozed off in the back seat, stretched his legs, and somehow stuck his huge foot near the hinge of the door.

Wicks later had a most amazing escapade in France.

He was shot down during a patrol covering Dunkirk, and feared lost. The Committee of Adjustment had begun to sit and the Adjutant had performed the unhappy task of informing his parents that their son was missing. Ten days later Wicks arrived. He walked into the Mess at North Weald in the Belgian peasant’s smock in which he had passed himself off as a refugee. He had several days’ growth of beard, but had shaved off his moustache. On his head was stuck a greasy ‘Gorblimey’ hat. A refinement of the disguise was the smell of 59

Fighter Boy

garlic which hung round him like an aura. The only criticism of the whole make-up might have been that it was altogether too typical — a shade too theatrical to fool anyone. Nevertheless, it couldn’t have suited Wicks better, for it got him past a German sentry post among other things.

Brooker has also had his adventures, and like Wicks he eventually won the D.F.C. To his great disappointment he was posted from the squadron and made Personal Assistant to the then Air Officer Commanding Training Command. In the short time he held the job he created something of a sensation. The story goes that while flying the Great Man’s personal machine one day, luckily without a passenger, he turned off the petrol instead of on to the reserve supply and had to force-land with a dry carburettor. Shortly after this he managed to get permission to fly a Hurricane, also belonging to the A.O.C. While amusing himself with a few aerobatics, one of the gun panels on the wing fell off as he was halfway through a slow roll, hitting the tailplane and severely damaging it. Brooker was luckier in making a forced landing this time.

I feel sure he was not sorry to rejoin his squadron again.

Brooker is now C.O. of No. 1 Squadron.

The flights kept their machines separate and occupied different crew rooms in the hangars so that we saw little of ‘B’ Flight in working hours, and naturally it took me longer to know them well.

In command was Ian Soden, an officer who had done well at Cranwell and who later received what I believe was the first D.S.O. awarded to a fighter pilot operating with the B.E.F. in France in this war.

The rest of the flight was composed of F/O’s Frank Rose, Peter (‘Fling’) Illingworth, and P/O’s Peter Down, Peter Davies, and Leonid (‘Minney’) Ereminsky. Davies joined the Squadron about the same time as I did, having served some time as a ferry pilot. In spite of the fact that he was less than a year senior to me, he had flown over 600 hours and over forty different types of aircraft.

Ereminsky was a White Russian who had lived in England since an early age and had gone to school in this country. He volunteered 60

56 Squadron, North Weald

to go to France early in 1940 as a member of a Gladiator squadron, but returned to 56 at the end of that year.

One of the older serving members of 56 was F/O Eustace (‘Gus’) Holden, who was then Squadron Adjutant. He was released for fulltime flying duties later when it was decided that Squadron Adjutants need not be pilots, as was formerly the case. He became Commander of ‘B’ Flight, but was later posted to another Hurricane squadron with which he served with great distinction in France. He now holds the D.F.C. and, after commanding 501 Squadron, went out East on ferrying duties.

‘Gus’ was a strange mixture. In appearance he was tough, but in manner a polished man-about-town. A natural humorist, he had so long affected a certain Olde Worlde courtliness and manner of speech that he moved with the grace and dignity of a Jeffery Farnol beau, whether in the company of his fellow pilots or in the ‘too too’ precious atmosphere of the drawing-rooms of the élite of the county, who, no matter where the squadron went, invariably seemed to ferret him out as their protege. But he rarely lost his sense of humour.

We were lucky in having four experienced Sergeant Pilots, the most senior of whom were F/Sgt Higginson of ‘B’ Flight and Sgt Cooney of ‘A’ Flight. Cooney was an expert aerobatic pilot, and had, I believe, together with Joslin and Morewood, formed a section who had flown in an Empire Air Day display held at Hendon the year before.

61

8

AUGUST 1939

A few weeks before war broke out, I decided to buy a dog. I had in mind a wire-haired fox-terrier, a breed of which I am particularly fond. The question was where to get one. One of the Mess stewards, I was told, was something of a dog fancier, so I sought his advice. He told me he had nothing for sale himself, but a drinking acquaintance of his at Ongar had told him that he had heard of a fox-terrier puppy which was ‘going cheap for a good owner’.

The next evening, Fling and I drove over to the address which the steward had obtained for me. It proved to be a small cottage on the outskirts of Ongar.

The man of the house, an honest-looking farm labourer, told us that his only reason for parting with the dog was that he had no room for it at home ‘what with the kids and everything’. We gathered that it would be a great disappointment to them but he and his wife had decided that the dog must go.

‘Too bad,’ we agreed, genuinely touched, and asked to see the dog.

The man beckoned us to follow him into the small outhouse that served as a kitchen. There, stretched out like an uncouth farm boy who had been at his master’s beer, lay the pup, sleeping ungracefully by the remnants of what had apparently been a monstrous meal of bones and scraps.

The man prodded the tight little belly with the toe of his boot.

The pup grunted, opened one eye, and obviously indifferent to the 62

August 1939

whole proceedings, rolled over and went to sleep again. He was at an age when his day started and ended with a good meal and when, replete with food, even such a momentous matter as we were then discussing, a matter vitally affecting his destiny, was not to be allowed to interfere with his after-dinner and before-supper nap.

‘Of course, he couldn’t be expected to be what you might call a good house dog, at his age,’ said the man.

‘Of course not,’ we murmured.

‘And he ain’t what you might call a pedigree, of course.’

‘Of course not,’ we readily agreed.

‘I got him from the farm when master died. He were no more’n a few days old then. I were goin’ to dock his tail to make him look a bit smarter like, but the missis and the kids wouldn’t hear o’ it. Proper crool, they said, ‘specially the kids. So o’ course I had to give in.’

We took one look at the tail, which was already starting to coil like a watch-spring.

‘Do you think we might wake him up?’ we asked politely. ‘Just so that we could have a better look at him?’

‘Buddy,’ roared the man. ‘Stand up and let the gentlemen have a look at yer.’

The volume of his voice shook the crockery on the mantelpiece but the pup never moved. His basket was well under the table, out of easy reach.

In a flash of inspiration, Fling picked up a spoon lying on the table and clattered it on a dish. The trick worked.

The magnificent tail unwound itself and for an instant remained taut, miraculously straight, and when the spasm of the awakening yawn had passed, snapped into its original shape. We watched, fascinated.

It reminded one of those toy paper coils with a mouthpiece which, when blown into, shoot out rigid under the force of the breath, and whistle — I almost expected the tail to whistle.

The clatter to him spelt F-O-O-D, and in order to get that food one had to get out of one’s basket.

The pup crawled out from under the table and stood staring fixedly at Fling, who was looking slightly ridiculous, spoon in hand.

63

Fighter Boy

The whole of the pup’s hindquarters shook violently (this was apparently the nearest he could get to wagging his tail), but as he stood there with his head lifted and his legs straight, he showed that if he lacked all-round good looks, he had poise. His markings were good and he carried his ears well.

‘How much do you want for him?’ I asked.

‘Thirty bob,’ said the man.

Fling and I looked at each other incredulously. It was fantastic.

The man must be joking. Five shillings would have been a generous price for that mongrel.

One of the children, a small girl, who had been watching the proceedings dispassionately up to the present, rushed to her father’s side. She removed the large slice of bread and jam from her mouth.

‘Nobody’s going to take away our Buddy,’ she screamed, and before we could assure her that nothing was further from our thoughts, she unleashed a flood of tears.

Some seven or eight other children of assorted sizes, attracted by the noise, appeared as if from nowhere.

‘Nobody’s going to take away our Buddy,’ screamed the first child again.

The others, sensing the seriousness of the situation, took up the chorus: ‘Nobody’s going to take away our Buddy.’

The noise was the signal for the mother to come rushing into the room.

‘Shut up!’ she screeched, above the din.

‘SHUT UP!’ roared the father.

The scene was fantastic, like something out of a passion play.

Again came the deafening chorus, ‘Nobody’s going to take away our Buddy...’ and the answering bass of the father bellowing in crescendo, ‘SHUT UP!’ Fling and I decided that it was time for action, not words. We flew out of the back door, the pup running playfully at our heels. He followed us down the garden path. We climbed into the car. It was still part of his game, so he followed.

64

August 1939

The three of us drove back to North Weald.

I sent the cheque next day.

Ever since that day at Ongar, Buddy has kept with me. He is now full-grown and a very senior member of the wartime 56.

Somehow I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think of him as a dog but as a lusty, slightly uncouth, Essex yokel.

Sometimes before taking him with me on leave, I have given him a bath and tried to smarten him up a little, but I am never wholly successful. Even dressed up he is still the country boy, his trousers a little too full round the bottoms, and a little too tight round the seat; his neck a little too red, and his tie a little too colourful, and above all, there is still the unmistakeable burr of his Essex accent. I am afraid he will never be a gentleman.

I never meant to give him a whole chapter. I had hoped somehow he would not obtrude into these pages at all. But then, I never expected him to break through our ranks one day when we were about to be inspected by the Minister for Air, at that time Sir Kingsley Wood, and still less did I expect him to follow such a great man around with a tennis ball in his mouth, while I was smartly drawn up at attention with the rest of the squadron, powerless to do anything.

After this, I was never really surprised when I was told that Buddy had been seen one day standing among the hounds at a Hunt Meeting some four miles from North Weald.

65

9

PHONEY WAR

At the end of August 1939, 56 Squadron, together with the other fighter squadrons in 11 Group, embarked on extensive manoeuvres in co-operation with Bomber Command.

They were realistic exercises and always referred to by us as ‘The War’ — a mock war which was the prelude to the real thing.

War! The last-minute intervention by the ‘Something’ which half the world had prayed would somehow prevent the inevitable had not materialised. There were too many forces of evil abroad for the miracle to happen.

At North Weald we received the news that we were at war with Germany with an outward calm. We were then young, perhaps too young, to understand the full implications of the news. Even the older ones among us who had known war, could not prophesy. We could but guess the nature of the horrors which the world would soon know again, but we were wide of the mark with our conceptions of the part we ourselves would have to play in this new conflict.

Someone had said, and we had no reason to disbelieve it, that the expectation of life of the average fighter pilot in action would be a matter of minutes.

Fantastic? Yes, but who then could have given the lie to such a gloomy philosophy? We made fun of it, of course, because we were soldiers and it was our duty to thrust doubt to the back of our minds.

66

Phoney War

Some of the opinions then widely held about the form that aerial warfare would take now make curious reading. For instance, the experts themselves inclined to the view that the day of individual combat in the air was gone. Speeds, they said, had increased so much at the expense of manoeuvrability, that never again would there be those glorious tournaments of the heavens which the older generation of fighter pilots had known in the last war.

No, this war was going to be fought principally in the air and it would be fought between fighter and bomber. We now know that both these prophecies were only half true. This war is no more an air war than it is a land or a sea war, while the particular nature of the war in the air has proved to be considerably more complex than the simple issue, fighter versus bomber. It has, moreover, retained many of the characteristics which made air fighting in the First World War fundamentally a match between men.

That is why I thank my stars that since it has been my destiny to fight, I have fought in the sky, for if there is any sport in modern warfare, it is in the air battle, and if there is glory in dying, it is in the knowledge that death comes only by the superiority of one’s adversary in honourable combat. If the numbers are unevenly matched in favour of the enemy, death is only more glorious. The fighter pilot does not reckon with the chance shell or bomb which may blast him to eternity; he reckons with a man armed as he is armed, and with whom he must come to grips before the issue can be decided.

All this, which is obvious now to those of us who have so far survived, was of course unknown and unguessed as we first heard the news that we were at war. It was not until six months later, when British and German fighters met in big air battles for the first time, that we knew what war was really going to mean to us as fighter pilots.

Although we ourselves could not at first fully comprehend the nature of the struggle which lay before us, we could have said with honesty that we were not afraid of it. The gloves were off and we were ready to see what a German could do in the air that each one 67

Fighter Boy

of us could not. We are still waiting to see that. We all knew that so far as numbers and material were concerned, it was not going to be a fair fight, but no one knew then how much that balance lay in the enemy’s favour.

As it was, one of the first things I did when war was declared was to go and see the Adjutant and make my will. This rather amused me, if only because I knew that my small bequests would look faintly ridiculous on the impressive regulation form.

All my worldly possessions, valued at no more than about £30, I left to Sylvia. The exception was my car. I left that to my cousin John.

John! Strange how it is that only in times such as these one really thinks much about relatives. But John had been more than a cousin.

Ever since our respective parents had decided to send us to the same preparatory school, we had been staunch friends. In recent years we had seen little of each other. Soon after leaving school, John had gone first to Germany and then to America before joining his elder brother, Ron, in his father’s business. John had made many friends in Germany and spoke the language well, for it had been part of his training in business to work in a tannery near Württemberg. The war might mean a little more to him than it did to those who had no friends among our new enemies. Ron had lived in Germany, too. He had a wife and baby daughter, only a few months old now, and he too would have to fight. And for a moment I had thought of the war as my own concern!

The fuse had been lighted and the rest of the world put its fingers to its ears and waited for the bang.

Nothing happened.

We did not lack sufficient foresight to see that this early inactivity on the battlefront was propitious to a half-prepared nation, but it was hard to take the war very seriously. We had expected so much and so little had happened. Now, six months after war had been declared, the opposing armies had done no more than pull faces at one another over the Western Front, while most of us in the Air Force had not so much as seen a German machine. Gone were working 68

Phoney War

parades, long leaves, guest nights, and civilian clothes, but essentially life was not much changed.

Then one November day the squadron moved to Martlesham Heath on the Suffolk coast. More than a mere change of scene awaited us â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we had at least moved a step nearer actual warfare.

But it was a small step.

69

10

FIRST ENCOUNTER

Three of us sat playing a half-hearted game of cribbage in the corner of the dismal little room which served as our Flight Office. We had come to readiness at dawn and now it was getting towards teatime.

Except for a section of ‘B’ Flight which was away on patrol at the moment, none of us had flown that day and we were bored. It had been the same ever since we had moved to Martlesham a month ago. Long periods of ‘standing by’, with the monotony broken only when we were required to patrol an occasional convoy of cargo vessels, were beginning to get on our nerves. At first the job had been interesting because it was new to us, but now it had become routine — dull routine. If convoys were being attacked, as the Germans were claiming, it certainly was not in our sector.

The rest of the flight slumped in chairs, reading or dozing. The ‘Fuehrer’ sat at an improvised desk by a telephone which formed our only link with the outside world. It was, however, an important link, for it connected us with Operations staff in the next county, and, indirectly, with Fighter Command, both of whom were responsible for our movements and instructions. A week before, that same telephone bell had rung several times daily, jerking us into wakefulness and sending us clambering into our machines, only to receive orders to land almost as soon as we were airborne. Since then it had been practically silent.

70

First Encounter

It had rung once today but only to announce the old instruction, ‘One section to patrol a convoy off Harwich’. It was ‘B’ Flight’s turn, and Soden had taken off with Peter Down and Fling.

Joslin passed the cards to Fisher.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘how long have Ian and his boys been off now?’

‘About two hours, I make it,’ I said.

‘The convoy should be somewhere off Orfordness by now, out of the sector: they should have been back long ago.’

There was a knock at the door. An airman came in, walked over to the ‘Fuehrer’s’ desk and saluted.

‘Excuse me, sir, Operations have just rung up wanting to know whether Mr Soden’s section has landed yet.’

‘You know it hasn’t — tell them so.’

‘Very good, sir.’ The airman saluted and made for the door.

‘Wait a minute,’ said the ‘Fuehrer’.

‘What are my orders to you about phoning up Operations?’

‘To notify them as soon as any of our machines take off, and the moment they have landed and refuelled, sir.’· ‘Why, then, did they ring you up?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Did it occur to you to ask?’

‘Well... “The” Fuehrer’ cut him short.

‘Go and find out then, you fool,’ he roared.

The airman rushed back to his telephone and returned again in a couple of minutes.

‘Please, sir, Operations say they haven’t heard anything from any of the machines for ten minutes now.’

‘I’ll give you the game,’ said Joslin, throwing in his hand. ‘I am going out for a breath of air.’

Fisher said he would go too.

The ‘Fuehrer’ had already left the room. One by one, on various pretexts, the others left, until only Brooker and myself remained. At length he closed his book with a snap.

71

Fighter Boy

‘Coming out for some air?’ he asked. I thought it might be a good thing. Together we walked out on to the tarmac. There we saw the others and, walking alone, the ‘Fuehrer’.

Once he looked at his watch. Then, turning up the collar of his greatcoat, he walked in the direction of the hangars. There was no doubt now that he looked worried.

In retrospect, of course, the whole incident was invested with a little too much drama, but then, what else could one expect? It was the first time things had turned out a little differently, and our nerves, attuned as they were to the monotony of the life we were leading had reacted a shade too violently.

Afterwards, when the last of the three machines had returned, we forgot our former apprehensions. If we had tried to hide our secret fears, we made no pretence of indifference when Ian, who was the first to land, taxied back to the tarmac where we were still standing.

He dismissed the driver of the petrol bowser and the armourers, and gave orders for the machine to be pushed into the hangar.

I walked round to the front of the machine. There were some wicked looking holes in the leading edge of the main plane, and a scar running the entire length of the fuselage. The machine was unserviceable and for a good reason. It had collected the squadron’s first bullet holes of the war. Soon, Fling and Peter came in. Back in the Mess we heard their story.

Shortly after arriving on patrol, some twenty miles off Harwich, they had spotted a machine flying towards the leading ship at about their own height.

‘We wheeled over and made straight for him,’ said Ian. ‘But he must have seen us, for he made a bee-line for a lump of thick cloud.

He had a biggish start on us so I rang up Peter and Fling on the R/T (wireless) and told them to widen out into search formation. We went slap through the middle of the cloud and then, just in front of me, I saw the machine again. I saw it was some kind of flying-boat and I noticed its German markings straight away. I got him in my sights and gave him a short burst. Almost immediately I had to break away, for he passed straight underneath me. We must have had an 72

First Encounter

overtaking speed of well over a hundred, and that is probably what saved him, for by the time we had overshot and started to turn again for another attack, he had disappeared.’

Peter and Fling, he told us, were a little too wide to get their sights on in the brief instant they saw the machine, but Fling said that as he broke away he saw something fall off the port wing of the machine.

Judging by the way it was flying, he guessed that the ‘something’ had probably been a wingtip or aileron. He also noticed something that Ian had not seen — the Rear Gunner firing.

We were never able to confirm what had happened to that machine, and although the wreckage of a flying-boat was washed up further down the coast a few weeks later, 56 did not claim it.

73

11

MARTLESHAM

During those first few weeks at Martlesham we had the entire station to ourselves. For many years it had been used for experimental research, and most of the flying done then was by test pilots, but soon after the outbreak of war it was made an Operational Station.

It was not immediately taken over by Fighter Command, for a Blenheim Bomber squadron used it as a satellite aerodrome for a few weeks.

One of their Flight Commanders was Doran, whom we met in the Mess on a number of occasions. He had already achieved fame for his part in the audacious raid on Wilhelmshaven which his squadron had carried out. He was the first man I had seen of my generation wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

I remember him as a shortish, broadly-built man who seemed to get an immense amount of fun out of life. It was some time after his squadron had finally ceased to use Martlesham that we heard that he had been posted missing following a bombing raid. The news came as a great shock to us, though our squadron had not known him intimately. How much, of necessity, were we later to become hardened to such things! A month or so later it became known that Doran had not been killed, as we had feared, but was a prisoner of war.

Seventeen Squadron, and later 504 (County of Nottingham) Squadron, were the next to join us at Martlesham. These squadrons 74

Martlesham

both used the station as an advanced aerodrome for one flight of theirs at a time. The next piece of excitement fell to the lot of a section of 504 Squadron. While on patrol one morning, they sighted a German bomber. As in our case, the ensuing engagement was not entirely satisfactory, for in shooting it down, two of the Hurricanes were themselves so shot up that they had to force-land, one pilot receiving slight injuries.

Apart from these two incidents, life at Martlesham continued to be uneventful so far as our operational duties were concerned, but excitement of another kind we did have one day.

Snow had fallen intermittently for three or four days, but had not settled sufficiently to hinder us. As we drove down to Flights early the following morning we saw that the previous night’s fall had been exceptionally heavy, and that the entire aerodrome was covered to a depth of several inches and was plainly unserviceable.

We searched the station and the entire district in vain for a snowplough. Meanwhile fitters applied their skill to a variety of improvised contraptions which, attached to lorries, it was hoped, would at least furnish us with one runway. None of these proved a success and at length it was decided that the homely shovel should be given a trial, so officers and men of all three squadrons began shortly after breakfast and worked throughout the entire morning.

In every way the attempt was hopeless, for after about five hours of continuous labour we had only managed to clear enough runway for a Tiger Moth in a very high wind.

Finally a snowplough did arrive, and the job was completed in double-quick time. But had one German reconnaissance machine taken a look at Martlesham in the morning and done its job properly, the whole bomber force of the Luftwaffe could have had a field day at our expense, while we would have had to remain helpless on the ground.

Snow again fell heavily overnight but, thanks to our snowploughs, the aerodrome was serviceable for us next morning. The wind had veered slightly, sufficiently to make landing along the clearing less than a dozen yards wide in the snow, a hazardous business, 75

Fighter Boy

for coming in with even the slightest drift, as somebody in 504 demonstrated, meant careering into the snow at the side and ending up on one’s nose, with at least a smashed propeller.

In the afternoon we had a ‘flap’. Orders came over the telephone for ‘A’ Flight to take off and search for an aircraft, believed hostile, in the vicinity of Aldeburgh. The ‘Fuehrer’ taxied out first, while the rest of us queued up to await our turn to take off. As each succeeding aircraft got into position, it was subjected to a blizzard winnowed by the preceding machine’s propeller, for the width of the runway made it necessary for us to take off singly and along the same path. I was last off and had to go flat out to catch the others.

Orders came over the R/T vectoring us out to sea. We had just passed over the coast when my engine gave two small coughs.

Modern aircraft, and particularly engines, being what they are, had probably spoilt me. I thought I must be mistaken, engines never go wrong these days! Again, this time more plainly, there came a further series of coughs, and finally a bang. It was almost indecent. It was the first time I had heard a Rolls-Royce engine create an indiscretion, but here was mine belching like the meanest two-stroke. The pointer of the rev. counter began to rock steadily to and fro on its dial.

Something was seriously wrong. I must get the machine down in one piece before the motor cut altogether.

I throttled back and swung the nose in the direction of the aerodrome again. On half-throttle the engine was still rough, but it did not repeat any of its former symptoms and I touched down safely, soared up the avenue of snowdrifts, and came to a safe standstill.

I explained the trouble to my fitter. He got into the cockpit and ran the engine up to full throttle again and again. It was extraordinary but now it appeared to be running perfectly. The boost gauge showed it was developing full power while the rev. counter never wavered.

I gave orders for the engine to be switched off and walked into the Flight Office to report what had happened. As I opened the door, I was surprised to find the ‘Fuehrer’. Both he and Joslin must have landed before me. There could be only one explanation of this. They too must have had some sort of trouble.

76

Martlesham

Brooker and Wicks were next to arrive. They had intercepted a machine which had turned out to be friendly, but on the way home Sergeant Cooney, the remaining member of the flight, who had been keeping with them all the time, left the formation. They followed him but he finally disappeared from their sight behind some trees.

They searched the vicinity but saw no signs of the machine.

And no wonder, for little remained of it when we found it afterwards.

Cooney solved part of that afternoon’s mystery for us when he came-to in Ipswich Hospital next day. His engine had, for some reason, completely cut out, he told us, and the last he could remember was heading for a field behind some cottages to make a forced landing. His approach was an extremely tricky one, and what had happened, as we were enabled to enlighten him, was that he had hit the roof of one of the cottages. This explained in some measure how the engine of the machine had been found in a bedroom, and the fuselage, with Cooney still in it, squeezed up like a concertina against a tree in the garden.

The other part of the mystery was solved some time afterwards by technicians sent down by Rolls-Royce themselves. It was found that our trouble had been caused through snow sticking in a gauze inside the air inlet to the carburettors. In the case of Cooney’s machine, the snow had frozen and completely choked the engine.

Cooney accepted the explanation like a gentleman.

77

12

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM, CHRISTMAS 1939 – SPRING 1940 At Christmas 1939, when I managed to get seven days’ leave, I decided to go over to Jersey to see my family. What disappointment attended the first part of that leave, but upon what a gloriously high and happy note it ended!

I told Willard, my batman, to get my bags ready for an early start, for I had arranged to catch a Jersey Airways’ plane which was due to leave for Jersey from Shoreham in the early afternoon, and I was anxious to allow myself as much time as possible for the road journey. My five-year-old Ford had proved itself pretty reliable and had never let me down on a long run, but one never knew! When Willard heard of my plans he mentioned that my route would take me somewhere near Sevenoaks, where he had a house. He told me that he had not had leave for seven months, and although he had applied for it only that week, he still had received no notification that the application was to be granted.

A wink was as good as a nod, and I took the matter up with the C.O. himself, with the result that Willard got his leave. Naturally, I offered to take him with me and so save him the train fare home.

Willard was an elderly little man with a toothbrush moustache and a perfect Cockney accent. He had started his Service career in the Army, but had transferred to the R.F.C. during the last war. In all, he had seen some thirty-three years’ service. He had been my batman at North Weald. He was an ardent bridge-player, and his chief grouse 78

The Calm Before the Storm, Christmas 1939 – Spring 1940

against Martlesham, or any other station for that matter, was that the other batmen did not seem very keen on the game. Thus a week’s leave held for him the prospect of unlimited bridge drives, and, of course, of seeing his house again. Willard was a bachelor, but for a reason best known to himself, he insisted on keeping his house, although even in peacetime he could hope to spend only a few weeks of each year living in it. But there it remained, full of furniture and locked. Willard kept the key in his pocket, for he would never consider letting it.

So off we set, with Willard by my side in the front seat, and squeezed somewhere among the luggage in the back, Buddy.

Midway between Colchester and Chelmsford and many miles from the nearest garage, we had a puncture. I had a spare wheel but not the means of changing it, so we drove on to the next garage on the flat tyre. By the time we arrived, the deflated tyre had torn itself to ribbons and I had to buy a: new one. This was the first setback.

The second manifested itself a few miles on, when we found that the drizzle we had encountered all the way was turning to thick fog.

This in turn became worse, so that soon we were forced to cut down our speed to fifteen miles per hour. It was now past midday and, by the time we had groped our way past Chelmsford, I had given up hope of ever catching the plane at Shoreham, even if the fog did not extend so far south and services were still running.

There was a chance, however, of catching a train from Waterloo and sailing from Southampton by the midnight boat. I stopped at a roadside phone-box and rang up the station, only to learn that all services had been cancelled owing to fog. The next boat would not leave until the following night.

I ran Willard to Ongar and despatched him and Buddy on the branch line for Liverpool Street. The weather, at least, need not interfere unduly with them. Meanwhile, I drove on to North Weald and spent the night there.

I rang up Waterloo the following morning and asked the time of departure of the next boat train for the Channel Islands. I was told, contrary to the previous information, that it would not leave until the following day.

79

Fighter Boy

‘But,’ I pointed out, ‘I rang up yesterday and was told that, as last night’s train had been cancelled owing to fog, there would be a service today.’

The man at the other end of the wire held the trump card. ‘Aha,’ he said with maddening jocularity, ‘but we changed our minds and the train and the boat left!’

His words were the obituary to the whole of my precious leave.

However, this interlude had a happy ending. Before returning to Martlesham I became engaged to Sylvia, who is now my wife. At the time she was staying with friends in London, people whom I knew only slightly; but I was determined to see her. My disappointments in other directions must have in some way emboldened me, for I not only succeeded in taking her out for the evening, but asked the question which somehow before I had never managed to articulate.

And Sylvia said ‘Yes!...’

I got another week’s leave early in February and we were married at St Paul’s Church, Canonbury Park.

On this leave there was no fog, but snow, and the world looked beautiful.

Our life at Martlesham, as I have indicated, was a comparatively quiet one, but before we returned to North Weald in the early spring we were to feel for the first time the hot breath of war, which so far had not penetrated these shores. It was 17 Squadron who received the full force of the blast — we were but spectators.

Lounging in our crew rooms, we had heard the Hurricanes of No. 17 Squadron take off shortly before tea. Even the fact that the whole squadron had left instead of the usual section or flight, which at that time was all that was generally used for a ‘flap’ or convoy patrol, had aroused in us little interest.

They had been detailed to carry out an offensive patrol over a part of Holland which had already been overrun by the Germans, but so closely guarded were details of their mission that even we, a brother squadron, did not realise that anything extraordinary was afoot.

Two hours later, when a single Hurricane circled the aerodrome and made its landing approach over the roof of our Flight Office, we sat 80

The Calm Before the Storm, Christmas 1939 – Spring 1940

bolt upright in our chairs. Above the growl of the throttled-back engine there was a shriek. That could only mean one thing. The machine had been fighting (The gun ports, which are housed in the leading edge of the main-plane, are ‘sealed’ with fabric to prevent the ingress of water and other foreign bodies. When the guns are fired, the fabric is broken.

The slipstream penetrating the barrels of the guns then accounts for this peculiar tell-tale noise, audible of course only to those on the ground.)

Again we had that same premonition which had sent us out on to the tarmac when Ian had landed after ‘B’ Flight’s first brush with the enemy.

We got outside in time to see the machine turning on a fresh circuit at the far end of the aerodrome. For some reason it had not toucheddown, but was now getting into position for another attempt with clumsy flat turns. When it finally touched-down and taxied up to the tarmac, we saw that the pilot was Meredith, one of the section leaders.

His face was grimy with the smoke from his guns and he looked tired, but he was excited.

One of us had already begun to chaff him about his two attempts to get into the aerodrome.

Meredith pointed to his machine.

‘Take a good look,’ he said, ‘and if any of you chaps thinks he can do any better, let him try.’

We walked over to the machine and inspected it closely.

Just how Meredith ever got it back all the way from Holland, or even flew it, will for ever remain a mystery to me. Apart from a sprinkling of holes on the rear of the fuselage, a good deal of damage had obviously been done to the port wing. In fact, the aileron cables had been completely severed.

Meredith waved aside our congratulations on his safe return. ‘All I had to do,’ he said, ‘was to keep straight with the rudder and the machine did the rest, but landing was a bit tricky.’

He told us that before he was attacked he had fired at one of the German fighters which had presumably been sent up to intercept, and had seen it break away, obviously in trouble.

81

Fighter Boy

As we stood talking, other machines began to arrive.

Next to land was Jeffries, Meredith’s Flight Commander, who later won the D.F.C. and, while serving as Flight Commander of a Polish squadron, the Virtuti Militari. He had seen a little more of the fight than Meredith, and he described how the squadron had been split up by Me 109’s.

‘We all had a go at them,’ he said, ‘but they must have sheered off pretty quickly, for I never saw them again.’

He told us that he had spotted a Henschel 126 (the German counterpart of our Lysander) which had somehow got mixed up in the fight and which was very wisely trying to get away. Jeffries said he had followed it almost to the deck, where it started hedge-hopping in an effort to throw him off; ‘I gave him a long burst. In fact, by the time I saw him crash in a field, I had used up all my ammunition on him, so that when I broke away I had to make for home,’ he said.

Nearly all those who returned safely that day claimed at least one victory, but by the time dusk began to fall, we were forced to give up hope for any of the four Hurricanes which were still missing.

As is usual, those who had returned had been too preoccupied to notice exactly what had happened to the others, but they all agreed on seeing one Hurricane going down on fire. This turned out later to be the machine flown by a Sergeant Pilot, of whom no further news was heard.

News of the pilot of one of the other Hurricanes came some weeks later, when it was learned he had been made prisoner of war. Whether he baled out or force-landed will not be known until he is able to tell the story himself: his name is Hulton-Harropp and he is a brother of John, a former member of 56, who was killed in action soon after the outbreak of war, while serving with a Hurricane squadron.

Perhaps the most thrilling adventure of all was that of the C.O., S/Ldr Jackson, who also did not return that day.

After he had been posted as missing for some time he arrived back in England. He had force-landed and made his way to the coast, where he had boarded a boat bound for home. He had the bad luck 82

1. Pilot OfďŹ cer Barry Sutton, 1940.

Above: 2. Barry Sutton in 1937 with R.A.F.V.R. Sywell.

Left: 3. Letter from the Air Ministry notifying Barryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family of his injuries on 20 May 1940.

Above: 4. From left to right, Barry Sutton, Flying Officer Eustace (‘Gus’) Holden D.F.C. and Pilot Officer Peter Down at North Weald 1940. Unusually in a photograph of Battle of Britain pilots all three survived the war. Barry described ‘Gus’ as ‘a strange mixture. In appearance he was tough, but in manner a polished manabout-town’. Barry flew with Peter Down many times.

Right: 5. Sylvia in her W.A.A.F. uniform. Sylvia and Barry got engaged whilst Barry was on seven days leave at Christmas 1939 and were married in February 1940.

6. Peter Down scrambles from North Weald, August 1940. He is still alive today.

7. An early photograph of Some of Barry’s fellow pilots in 56 Squadron, September 1939. Standing from left to right: Lonid ‘Minney’ Ereminsky, Peter Down, Ian Soden D.S.O., J. Coghlan D.F.C., Peter ‘Fling’ Illingworth, Frank Rose. Seated from left: Montague ‘John’ Hulton-Harrop, Eustace ‘Gus’ Holden D.F.C.. Ian Soden, who helped Barry shot down his first enemy aircraft, was killed in action in France on 18 May 1940. Ereminsky was a White Russian who had lived in England since an early age.

Barry notes how he was killed in a flying accident on 17 June 1940. Coghlan was an ‘ace’ by the time Barry returned to his squadron after his injury and Illingworth had been posted to a Spitfire squadron.

Above and below: 8. & 9. Formations of Hurricanes, 1940.

10. A Hawker Hurricane 8-gun fighter as flown by Barry Sutton. Barry christened his Hurricane ‘Charlie’.

11. Hurricanes pulling away after making contact with German aircraft.

12. A Hurricane coming in to refuel and re-arm.

A photograph taken during the Battle of Britain.

13. A doomed German Dornier 17 bomber aircraft plummeting earthwards after being attacked by British ďŹ ghters. Barry Sutton jointly shot one down with two fellow Hurricane pilots on 18 May 1940.

14. A Dornier 17 after having crash-landed, 1940. Barry followed the Dornier 17 he and two fellow pilots had attacked and witnessed it crash-land and burst into ďŹ&#x201A;ames.

This page: 15. 16. & 17. British gun-camera images of German aircraft being shot down.

18. Hurricanes being refuelled immediately on return to their base.

19. A Hurricaneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s machine guns are reloaded and petrol tank refuelled on return to base.

20. Ground staff overhauling the Rolls Royce Merlin engine in the Hurricane.

21. A ďŹ ghter pilot in full ďŹ&#x201A;ying gear on the wing of his Hurricane.

22. A Junkers 87 dive bomber like the one shot down over the Channel by Barry during the Battle of Britain. At the time Barry was horrified at the thought that we had been responsible for the deaths of the two Germans.

23. A downed He 111. Barry encountered many 111s in the air, but perhaps most memorable from the ground when one flew only a few hundred feet overhead with a Hurricane on it’s tail in hot pursuit and firing on it.

24. A German Ju 88 bomber.

25. A Me 109 in ďŹ&#x201A;ight, 1940.

Above: 26. A downed Me 109. This was the Luftwaffe’s main fighter and although Barry’s recollections of being shot down are too hazy to be sure, it was probably an Me 109 that shot him down.

Right: 27. An R.A.F. pilot bailing out. Barry Sutton bailed out of his Hurricane on 26 August 1940, but had little recollection of the event as he was badly burned getting out of his aircraft. Due to the positioning of the fuel tanks on Hurricanes if a pilot was shot down flames would enter the cockpit. As a result a far larger proportion of Hurricane pilots suffered severe burns than Spitfire pilots.

28. Three fighter pilots live in a caravan beside their aircraft ready for instant action.

29. Fighter pilots pass the time waiting for action, 1940. Barry experienced long periods of ‘standing by’.

Above: 30. One of the iconic images created by the Air Ministry of a Battle of Britain ďŹ ghter pilot.

Below: 31. A classic photograph of Hurricane pilots taken at the height of the Battle of Britain in July 1940.

33. Barry flew Hurricanes throughout the Battle of Britain but a squadron of Spitfires shared the airfield at North Weald. Barry recalls: ‘A Flight Commander of that squadron, whom we met one day, told us of a remarkable incident involving one of his Sergeant Pilots, which had taken place the previous day, and which enabled him to dispose of an Me 109 without firing a shot. Finding he was being closely pursued from dead astern, he had dived steeply, pulling out only a few feet above sealevel. The 109 followed, but found that the manoeuvrability of the British machine [Spitfire] was too much for it. The German machine finished its dive in Davy Jones’s locker.’

Opposite: 32. A Spitfire in flight, 1940.

Right: 34. A Blenheim bomber in action over the Channel 1940.

Barry struck up a friendship with a Blenheim pilot whilst recuperating in hospital after being shot down.

Opposite: 35. Operations Room. It was from here that Barry Sutton would be directed towards enemy aircraft via his R/T. As a W.A.A.F., Sylvia aged 21 worked as a Plotter at a Fighter Command station such as this.

Above: 36. An air battle is in progress. In the Operations Room of a ďŹ ghter station Plotters with their croupier-like sticks mark up the position of the aircraft, while others man operational telephones.

37. A view of the Operations Room showing plotters at work on the table, a wartime image issued to the press with the actual plotting map obliterated for security reasons.

Above: 38. In the Control Room of a ďŹ ghter station R/T operators keep contact with pilots. One operator marks up the position of a ďŹ ghter on the indicator board, while others give pilots instructions to land.

Left: 39. A Plotter takes tally cards to mark up the position of squadrons on the indicator board.

Above: 40. Sylvia (second row, far right) with W.A.A.F. during the war.

Right: 41. Sylvia in her W.A.A.F. uniform.

Above: 42. Barry Sutton sitting on a Spitfire.

Below: 43. Barry Sutton ‘with hound’ in India, April 1943.

Above: 44. Barry Sutton with 135 Squadron in Calcutta 1942 (front row second from the left).

Below: 45. Barry Sutton (front row, ďŹ fth from left).

46. Barry Sutton at Aston Down, Gloucestershire c.1950.

47. The author and his wife.

48. Wing Commander Barry Sutton in the cockpit of a Hawker Hunter jet ďŹ ghter, North Weald 1957.

49. Barry Sutton and Sylvia in Cyprus in 1958.

50. Barry Suttonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s medals. His D.F.C. is on the extreme left.

The Calm Before the Storm, Christmas 1939 – Spring 1940

to burn himself rather badly when setting fire to his wrecked machine but has now quite recovered.

Thus, for this raid, 17 had emerged battered but victorious. Their bag of confirmed victories numbered seven while they themselves had lost three machines and two pilots.

It was while we were still at Martlesham that we lost two of the oldest members of 56, Roger Morewood and Richard Coe. I have already told of what became of Roger.

Richard went to be Flight Commander of a newly formed squadron of Canadians. At the time of its formation, the squadron was only equipped with training aircraft and the pilots themselves were not operationally trained.

After several weeks of hard work it was ready to take its place in the front line, and the pilots were detailed to take delivery of new Hurricanes. While he was leading his flight on this ferrying trip, Richard was killed.

The flight encountered very bad weather, with the result that every machine in it had to force-land. The country was difficult and the pilots wisely decided to carry out their landings with wheels up, and thus avoid seriously damaging the machines.

Richard was the only exception. He attempted a normal landing in an effort to save his machine from even the comparatively slight damage of a belly-landing, but his zeal was his undoing. His Hurricane finished up on its back. Richard was killed instantly, although his body showed no sign of external injury. His neck had been broken.

The affair was doubly tragic because he had been married only a few weeks before, and his bride had travelled from his home town in far-away New Brunswick.

Our movements as a squadron and our change of personnel hereafter became too frequent to record in detail. We seemed for a few weeks to be perpetually on the move as though the ‘Powers That Be’ were uncertain where we should be needed most when the great German Air Offensive came, as soon it surely must.

We filled in time to the best advantage. During April the weather was good, and when we came back again to North Weald at the 109

Fighter Boy

beginning of the month, the ‘Fuehrer’ decided that we were to spend as much time as possible in the air.

We practised interceptions, attacks in formation, dogfighting, and formation with such gusto that by the end of the month our squadron total of flying hours topped 700, which at that time was a record for the whole of Fighter Command.

Successful interceptions depend perhaps more than anything on good radio communication between Control on the ground and the pilots in the air, but there still remained much room for improvement in this direction. The radio set which a fighter carries is necessarily small, and a pilot hitherto needed practice before he could understand much of what came through his earphones. It must be borne in mind that the fighter pilot flying a single-seat machine has, in addition to operating his engine and flying controls, which in themselves are complex, to do his own gunnery and himself to attend to the tuning of his wireless set, which with the older type of set was almost a full-time job.

Towards the end of April our machines were equipped with a new and much improved type of set. Its advantages over its predecessor were manifold, but perhaps the most important were its increase in range and extreme simplicity of operation. Speech from Control, which before had so often sounded exactly like the ragings of Disney’s Donald Duck against the background of a frying pan, now reached our ears with the clarity of a local phone call.

For some time the thing was a novelty, and it formed the main topic of our conversation even in the Mess, where ‘shop’ was still unofficially taboo.

I carried out some of the initial tests at North Weald. I flew some miles out to sea and, at a height of a few hundred feet, carried on a two-way conversation with the Controller sitting in the Operations room on the aerodrome. I also circled round singing nursery rhymes and reciting bits of poetry, all of which were quite intelligible.

Joslin boasted of hearing dance music from Germany on one occasion, while often for amusement we tuned into another wavelength and heard Spitfire pilots talking to their base in Scotland.

110

The Calm Before the Storm, Christmas 1939 – Spring 1940

I have never heard the conversation of German pilots over the R/T, but many people have. The story of the excited German voice which cut right across everything during a conversation between Control and a Squadron Leader who was leading his boys into the fray during one engagement in the Battle of Britain is now well known in the Service.

Its message was, brief but plainly intelligible to all the pilots of the pursuing machines.

It was ‘Achtung, Achtung, Spitfeuer!’

One of the factors in the later overwhelming success of British fighters was our methods of aircraft detection which enabled controllers on the ground to tell our patrolling fighters the location, height, course, and a rough estimate of the number of enemy machines; in fact all the essential data required for a successful interception.

British scientists and technicians had for years been perfecting the complicated apparatus which was used in every Operations room of our fighter stations and which supplied this vital intelligence, and when the course of the war in the air changed in the summer of 1941, and it was the Germans’ turn to try their hand at intercepting large raids with their fighters, it immediately became obvious that in this particular field of technical development the enemy had been well outstripped.

Radio telephony, as I have said, had hitherto been far from perfect, but the new sets, working on an entirely new principle, kept pace with the progress made in other directions. We pilots welcomed them particularly because they eliminated what had previously often been a ‘worry’ in the air.

111

Fighter Boy Life as a Battle of Britain Pilot

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