Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop

Deere wrote later. ‘These attacks provided wonderful training for formation drill, but were worthless when related to effective shooting. There was never sufficient time to get one’s sights on the target, the business of keeping station being the prime requirement.’¹⁵ Pete Brothers and the rest of 32 Squadron at Biggin Hill prepared for war by following rigid scenarios that proposed set responses to set situations, practising on ‘enemy bombers’ that flew stolidly on, disdaining to take any evasive action. ‘If there was a small number of bombers your twelve aircraft would be divided up into sections of three. Then three of you would have a go at one bomber, one after the other. If there was a large number, you would spread out into echelon starboard [diagonally] setting it all up and giving them plenty of warning you were coming. It must have been all theoretical because no one had actually fought in these conditions before.’¹⁶

      The tactics taught to George Unwin in 19 Squadron were ‘more suited to the Hendon air display’ than the realities of war. When put into practice for the first time over Dunkirk, the results were to be disastrous. The severe limitations of the pre-war tactical approach was to become apparent almost immediately, but this did not stop it being taught well into the war. Roger Hall, a young, pre-war professional soldier who transferred to the RAF, was posted to 152 Squadron at the height of the fighting in September 1940 after only a week’s operational training. He remembered during his instruction being ‘briefed on how to attack a bomber, but it was so perfunctory really that it was almost ludicrous.’ Three pilots were designated to take off in their newly acquired Spitfires and ‘attack’ a Wellington which was playing the role of an enemy bomber. Green though he was, Hall knew that ‘when you attack a hostile bomber they try to get out of the way. But this particular one was simply flying straight and level…The drill was to get above the bomber and the first Spitfire would come down and shoot its port engine and then it would break away. The next one would come and shoot the starboard, then that would break away. Then the third one would come down and shoot the body of the machine and then break away, but all the time the Wellington was just going straight and level, just asking for it…I used to laugh about that.’¹⁷

      Brian Kingcome recalled that ‘fighter versus fighter wasn’t really envisaged or catered for’, and the assumption was that if they did take place they would be ‘pretty much as they were in the First World War except that you had faster, better aircraft and the huge advantage of a parachute’. None the less individual pilots did get in unofficial practice, going off in pairs to chase each other around the sky.¹⁸

      The pilots who went into action for the first time in 1939 and 1940 might have known a lot about flying. They knew little, though, about how to fight in the air and less about how to shoot. Aerial gunnery was supposed to be taught as part of training and each regular fighter squadron was expected to go to an annual camp at one of the armament training stations for practice with live ammunition, shooting at drogues towed behind other aircraft, or at ground targets. This was occasionally supplemented by the use of camera guns, from which theoretical scores could be deduced. It was all a long way from reality.

      In retrospect the amount of time spent on what was a fundamental air skill would seem desperately inadequate. ‘Looking back,’ Al Deere wrote afterwards, ‘I can see how dreadfully we neglected gunnery practice, live or by means of cine-films, and what an important part it plays in the part of a successful fighter pilot…squadron morale carried us safely through the early fighter battles of the war, not straight shooting.’¹⁹

      Some pilots never fired at an aerial target before going into action. Tony Bartley, the son of a colonial service judge, who was awarded a short-service commission after leaving Stowe school, did his training before the war. Yet the first time he aimed his guns at a flying object was when he shot at an Me 109 in May 1940. George Unwin was fortunate in having Harry Broadhurst, an outstanding shot, as his flight commander. ‘Training in shooting was nonexistent. No one ever taught you how to shoot. But he did.’ Broadhurst emphasized ‘that the key to shooting was to get in close and the closer you got the more chance you had of hitting’. Unwin, who became a gunner instructor later in his career, found that one of the biggest weaknesses among fighter pilots at the beginning of the war was their inability properly to calculate how far they were from the aircraft they were attacking, often opening fire long before they reached what combat experience would teach was the optimum range of 250 yards. In the pre-war days, when aircraft were still equipped with a simple ring sight, Broadhurst taught his charges to work out the distance of the target by measuring it against the diameter of the circle. At 400 yards a bomber the size of a Wellington exactly filled the sight. At 250 yards, the ring was just outboard of the two engines. It was simple and effective, but according to Unwin never taught systematically.

      The apparent explanation for the lack of firing practice was that, with tight financial restraints on the expansion programme, the Air Ministry had decided that spending money on the aircraft and pilots needed to man and equip the new squadrons took priority over new ranges, and so allowances for practice ammunition were cut to a minimum. There was no such excuse in 1940. By then shortage of time was to blame for a continuing failure to teach raw pilots how to shoot before throwing them into battle. When Archie Winskill, a softly spoken RAFVR volunteer from Cumberland, reached 72 Squadron at Biggin Hill on 4 October 1940, he was ‘well-schooled in formation flying and tactics but regrettably with no air-firing experience. I’d only fired my guns once into the sea off Liverpool…We knew nothing about deflection shooting.’²⁰

      What was needed to attack successfully was the skill to manoeuvre into a favourable position, the ability to judge the correct range to open fire, and finally, and usually equally importantly, the knowledge of how to angle the shot so it stood the best chance of hitting the enemy aeroplane. The latter was deflection shooting. In all but full-on frontal or rear attacks, shooting in a straight line was useless. To strike the target required ‘laying off’, in the same way that a game shooter aims ahead of the pheasant so that the bird flies into the spread of pellets. The principle was recognized in the clay pigeon range installed at pre-war Tangmere and copied later in the war at many fighter bases. Some of the most deadly pilots, like Bob Tuck and Adolph Malan, attributed at least some of their success to their skill with shotguns. The importance of deflection shooting was obvious. Winskill was not to learn it until he was sent off to a gunnery course long after the 1940 crisis had passed.

      The pilots of Fighter Command also went into the war with little idea of what they would be shooting at. George Unwin ‘didn’t know a thing’ about the Germans’ strengths, aircraft types and likely modus operandi before he met them in the air. At the time of Munich, the British air attache in Berlin made a tour of squadron bases and delivered a lecture about the Luftwaffe. But detailed intelligence briefings on the enemy were never given on an organized basis before the fighting began, and during the battles of 1940 pilots were seldom allowed a glimpse of the bigger picture. Their knowledge was confined to what had happened to them and their companions on the base, or what they heard on the radio. These shortcomings in training and preparation would only become fully apparent when revealed by the stresses of combat.

      The approach of the cataclysm forced the pilots to think about the future. That the crisis was coming to a head seemed surprisingly comforting to some. Watching Europe’s tottering, somnambulistic progress once more towards the precipice induced feelings of restlessness and a desire to get the inevitable over with. Peter Townsend, who at the time of the Abyssinian war had been sickened by the thought of the effects of bombs on men, found the sight of the enemy, clear and unambiguous, was a liberation. ‘A complete change of mind and heart had by now come over me…My pacifism of the previous year had evaporated; I was becoming rather bellicose – at least as bloody-minded as every other Englishman felt towards the swaggering, bullying Germans.’

      Townsend also noticed that the imminence of danger broke down whatever barriers remained between the new and the old RAF inside 43 Squadron, so that ‘in the growingly tense atmosphere, I was discovering