Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945. Patrick Bishop

The bright yellow Master landed and taxied over to a hangar, where White was presumed to be waiting. Then Deere heard ‘an excited yell from the usually placid Johnny’. Allen had seen a dozen Me 109s heading for the airfield. He attacked, and found himself in the middle of a frantic mêlée, shooting and being shot at.

      Deere dropped down to try and alert the Master, which had no R/T, by waggling his wings. As he did so a 109 flashed across his path. He latched on to it and reefed his Spitfire hard over in an attempt to turn inside the Me 109, the crucial manoeuvre in air fighting. If the chasing pilot succeeded in turning tighter, getting inside his opponent, he had the chance to fire a deflection burst, aimed in front for the enemy to fly into. If he failed, the target was always a little ahead, leaving the tracer twinkling harmlessly in his wake. Deere turned inside. He was preparing to fire when Allen’s voice again filled his earphones, calling for help. Deere asked Allen to ‘hang on while I kill this bastard’, and stayed clamped into the turn. Then, ‘in a last desperate attempt to avoid my fire, the Hun pilot straightened from his turn and pulled vertically upwards, thus writing his own death warrant. He presented me with a perfect no-deflection shot from dead below and I made no mistake. Smoke began to pour from his engine as the aircraft, now at the top of its climb, heeled slowly over in an uncontrolled stall and plunged vertically into the water’s edge from about 3,000 feet.’

      Now he went to look for Allen. As he climbed, he was seen by two 109s, which swung round steeply and started after him. Again Deere found that he could comfortably turn inside his pursuers, so that very quickly the roles were reversed and he was chasing them. Deere opened fire on the second 109, causing ‘bits to fly off’. Then he and the lead 109 went into an extended dogfight, chasing each other round at high speeds in tighter and tighter circles. Before the end Deere ran out of ammunition, but for reasons he could not later explain he continued the engagement until the German abruptly straightened out and headed east for home. Buzzing with adrenaline, Deere and Allen, whose Spitfire was by now ventilated with bullet holes, did the same. Deere indulged himself with a victory roll over the aerodrome as they came in.

      This encounter was the first time a Spitfire had gone up against a Messerschmitt and pilots and ground crew were hungry for details. Deere’s account was corroborated by ‘Prof Leathart, who had with White watched the combat from a ditch before they made their escape as soon as the sky was clear. Deere was excited and relieved. It seemed that one of the great questions that the fighter pilots, and those who directed them, had been asking themselves since the start of the war had been settled. Deere believed that as a result of his prolonged fight with the second 109 he had been able to assess practically the relative performance of the two aircraft. The experience of the Hurricanes in France, and the tests carried out on the Me 109 that had fallen into Allied hands, had concluded that the Messerschmitt could out-climb the Spitfire up to 20,000 feet, and always out-dive it, but was less agile at all altitudes. Deere agreed about the dive. The Messerschmitts, unlike the British fighters, had fuel injection, which meant they did not miss a beat at the moment of zero gravity that preceded a rapid descent. That aside, ‘the Spitfire was superior in most other fields, and like the Hurricane, vastly more manoeuvrable.’⁴ The Spitfire’s climbing performance had been significantly improved by the advent of the Rotol constant-speed airscrew.

      Later that day there was to be another formative experience for the squadron. That afternoon it took off on cross-Channel patrol and ran into a formation of bombers silhouetted above in the clear sky, heading for Dunkirk. After climbing above, unnoticed, and gaining the maximum tactical advantage, Leathart, who was leading, ordered a No. 5 attack. The four sections of three fanned out into echelon formation, each one tucked into a neat inverted V-shaped ‘vic’ slanting across the sky in a shallow diagonal, each pilot selecting his target. The flying discipline would have delighted their pre-war instructors. Then a panicked voice on the R/T shouted: ‘Christ, Messerschmitts – Break!’ The squadron instantly ‘split in all directions, all thoughts of blazing enemy bombers momentarily ousted by the desire to survive’.

      In the tumbling dogfight that followed, the 54 Squadron pilots claimed to have destroyed eight of the attacking Messerschmitts, but unfortunately no bombers, which were their primary targets. Despite this success, the encounter set off intense discussion of the value of the tactics they had been taught. The criticism was led by George Gribble, a ‘very English, very good-looking’ twenty-year-old short-service entrant. In Deere’s admiring opinion, he ‘epitomized the product of the public school; young yet mature, carefree yet serious when the situation required it, and above all possessing a courageous gaity’. Gribble told Leathart that ‘everybody was so damn busy making certain he got into the right position in the formation that we were very nearly all shot down for our pains’. Leathart, who was shortly to take over command, did not argue. He promised that henceforth there would be no more Fighter Area Attacks.⁵

      These cross-Channel clashes taught valuable lessons to the 11 Group squadrons. They provided a demonstration of the startling reality of air fighting, but allowed the pilots an opportunity to recover and digest their experiences. Previously no one had known what to expect. During the first days of the Battle of France, 32 Squadron, flying from Biggin Hill, had barely seen the enemy. Michael Crossley noted one day’s non-events with typical candour and idiosyncratic punctuation in the squadron diary. ‘All set off to France, land at Abbeville, refuel, hear dreadful stories, get very frightened, do a patrol, see nothing, feel better, do another, see nothing, feel much better, return to Biggin Hill, feel grand.’⁶

      Mike Crossley was over six feet tall, with jug ears, dark, smiling eyes and a slightly caddish moustache. Between leaving Eton and joining the RAF he had studied aeronautical engineering, worked as an assistant director at Elstree film studios and signed on as an apprentice with De Havilland. He was a natural musician who played the guitar and trumpet brilliantly and had a jokey manner that sometimes appeared to border on the facetious. Crossley, though, could be serious enough when he had to be. Shortly after writing the diary entry he became the first pilot in the squadron to shoot down an Me 109, with a perfect deflection shot, and was to destroy three more in the next four days. Pete Brothers also shot down an Me 109 in the same encounter. In the following week the squadron was in action almost daily, flying offensive patrols and escorting bomber raids, using each sortie to add to its stock of collective and individual knowledge and increase its effectiveness and its members’ chances of survival. Its pilots’ capacity to learn meant that 32 Squadron remained intact as a fighting force for the next three months and was not withdrawn from the line until the end of August.

      Squadron commanders and pilots drew their own conclusions from their experiences and acted on them without waiting to seek approval from above. The nature of the fighting meant that advice or direction from superiors not involved in daily combat carried little authority. To their credit, Dowding and the best of his senior commanders accepted that their own understanding of what was happening could well be inferior to that of even the most junior front-line pilot. They sought their opinions, listened to what they had to say and, when needed, took action.

      The new rules of air fighting were being made up with each clash. To succeed, merely to survive, required an adaptability that was found chiefly in the young. In the mayfly span of a fighter pilot’s effective life, young meant under twenty-two. The older pilots commanding the squadrons, in whom the parade ground rigidity of the old tactics were strongly ingrained, were for all their experience and flying skills often among the first to go. Roger Bushell, the peacetime barrister who had helped defend Johnny Freeborn and Paddy Byrne and moved up to command 92 Squadron, was shot down on his first day. He would be missed. The squadron was essentially a new creation, having been re-formed only the previous October. Bushell was moved from 601 Auxiliary Squadron to supervise the birth, overseeing training, the switch from Blenheim bombers to Spitfires and infusing the nascent squadron spirit with his personality. He was born in South Africa, moved to England and went to Wellington public school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was tough, intelligent and warm-hearted, and a good drinker. He was also a sportsman, a superb skier, coaching the British team in the 1936 Winter Olympics. He had a permanently half-hooded eye, the result of a skiing accident, which gave him a truculent look.