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

was all that was hoped for when Operation Dynamo was launched. ‘So who got them off?’ Tony Bartley asked later. ‘Fighter Command – let’s not kid ourselves.’²⁴

      By the end of 4 June it was finished. Tim Vigors, who had joined 222 Squadron after leaving Cranwell, went off on the last patrol. ‘The town and its surroundings really did now resemble Dante’s inferno,’ he wrote later. ‘All remaining oil stores, fuel supplies and equipment which had not burnt already were now set on fire…Vast clouds of flame and smoke billowed into the air.’²⁵ When pilots from 610 Squadron flew the final sortie of the day, they did not meet a single enemy aircraft. On the beaches they could see the French troops who had missed the last boat to freedom, who waved farewell to them and awaited the arrival of the Germans. The Fighter Command pilots had flown 2,739 sorties. They went gratefully off on short leaves to family or friends, anywhere that gave them a taste of their former lives.

      Churchill, searching to find worth in a humiliating episode, glimpsed one shining thing of value in the smoke, waste and ruin and reached out to grasp it. Addressing a House of Commons glowing with relief at the success of the rescue operation, he warned that it would be a mistake to regard Dunkirk as a victory, as wars were ‘not won by evacuations.’. He went on, ‘But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted. It was gained by the Royal Air Force.’

      In terms of relative losses, this was a bold claim to make. The number of RAF aircraft destroyed was reckoned to be 106, against 390 on the German side, a highly optimistic calculation. German documents found after the war put their Dunkirk-related losses at 132, some of which were shot down by anti-aircraft fire. On the human side of the ledger, fifty-six Fighter Command pilots were killed and six aircrew, the latter gunners on the Boulton Paul Defiants, which made a brief appearance in the battle. Eight pilots were taken prisoner and eleven pilots and one air-gunner were wounded. The figures could not express the whole truth of the situation. There were other crucial elements, concerning experience, leadership and morale, that statistics could not measure.

       9 Doing It

      Pilots returning from their first proper sortie were inevitably cornered by even greener members of the squadron with the question: ‘What was it like?’ By now, the middle of June, many of the pilots in Fighter Command had some idea of the answer. They knew to varying degrees the reality of the things they had so often wondered about: what it was to be shot at and to shoot, how it felt to watch friends and enemies die. They had heard the clatter of flying debris against wings and fuselage and been blinded by the oil spray from an exploding aircraft. They knew now the jolt of panic at the yelled warning, the violent, instinctive reaction, the swirling confusion of a dogfight and the strange emptiness and quiet that suddenly followed. These were universal experiences, but the near impossibility of describing combat meant that the stories of the initiated did not help very much. To understand it, to gauge your ability to withstand it, you had to do it.

      At Duxford aerodrome at 4 a.m. on 29 May, Tim Vigors was woken with a cup of tea by his batman. He gave his lurcher, Snipe, a farewell hug, telling him he would see him that evening, and was driven out to dispersal. Under arc lights that cut through the pre-dawn murk, ground crews were making last adjustments to the Spitfires. Then the commander of 222 Squadron, Squadron Leader Herbert ‘Tubby’ Mermagen, who, girth notwithstanding, had performed acrobatics for the King before the war, gave the eleven pilots flying with him that day their instructions. They were to head to Dunkirk in line astern, then patrol in formation, unless told otherwise, and return to Homchurch. Vigors, like most of the others, had never been in action before.

      I walked over to my aircraft to make sure everything was in order [he wrote later]. My mouth was dry and for the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the expression ‘taste of fear’. I suddenly realized that the moment had arrived…Within an hour I could be battling for my life, being shot at with real bullets by a man whose one desire in life was to kill me. Up until now it had all somehow been a game, like a Biggles book where the heroes always survived the battles and it was generally only the baddies who got the chop. I was dead scared and knew I had somehow to control this fear and not show it to my fellow pilots.¹

      He flew eastwards, seeing the sun edge above the horizon. Then the towers of smoke over Dunkirk came into view. As they reached the coast one of the weavers flying behind and above warned there were enemy aircraft below. Mermagen led his flight into a diving attack. Vigors was in the other flight, commanded by Douglas Bader, circling overhead. Bader spotted a formation of Me 109s flying 5,000 feet above that appeared not to have seen the Spitfires. They climbed up behind them and were within 1,000 feet when the Messerschmitts realized the danger and turned round to attack. Vigors banked hard to try and cut inside the turn of one German fighter, but was immediately distracted by the alarming sight of glowing white tracer flowing past his port wing-tip. In that moment his first reaction was ‘extreme fear which temporarily froze my ability to think. This was quickly replaced by an overwhelming desire for self-preservation.’ Fortunately, unlike many pilots, he had done some practice dogfighting which had taught him that, if he tried to climb away, he would present a steady target to his attacker. Counter to his instincts, he went into a second evasive move and ‘pushed violently forward and sideways on the stick, which flung my Spitfire into a sudden and violent dive which threw my whole weight with unpleasant strength against my shoulder harness’. It seemed to have worked. The tracer stopped.

      He had lost a lot of height in the manoeuvre, and pulling out of the dive he climbed cautiously back up, glancing around constantly, until he was above the mêlée that had developed. Then he dived down into the action, picking out a 109 that was chasing a Spitfire in a circle, and pulled in behind him.

      Trying to get him in my sights I pulled hard back on the stick and pressed my right thumb on the firing button in the middle of the spade grip on the top of my control column. My aircraft shuddered and tracers shot out from the front of my wings. I could see them passing harmlessly below him. Keeping my finger on the firing button I hauled back even further on the stick, trying to drag the nose of my own aircraft above him. Gradually the tracer came closer to his tail, but just as I thought I had him, he realized his danger and flicked over on his left side and dived.

      Vigors followed, still firing, and optimistically thought afterwards that he might have shot a piece off the 109’s tail. He broke off when he again came under attack from behind. This time he forgot his training and pulled into an almost vertical climb, blacking out in the process, and came to in time to see the Messerschmitt diving past. Then, as every pilot was to remark in such circumstances, he found to his amazement ‘I couldn’t see another aircraft in the sky…a moment before the whole sky had been filled with circling and diving aircraft and now there was not one of them to be seen’.

      In the calm Vigors looked at his watch and saw he had been flying for an hour and a half. He had been hurling his Spitfire about with the throttle wide open, and was in danger of running out of petrol and crashing into the sea. As he turned for home, his first relieved thought was that he was still alive. Also, his Spitfire appeared undamaged. Apart from just possibly having damaged a 109’s tail, he had done nothing apart from distracting the enemy.

      His biggest concern was ‘how deadly scared I’d been when I first saw those enemy bullets streaming past my wing-tip. I had never known any fear like that before in my life…I just fervently hoped I could keep it under control.’ Vigors met Bader on landing and gave a suitably stiff-upper-lip account of the engagement. But when he reached dispersal, where the returning 222 Squadron pilots were noisily and excitedly discussing the fight, and saw Hilary Edridge, his best friend in the squadron, neither of them hid their feelings.

      ‘Glad to see you in one piece,’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you do?’

      ‘Never been more scared in my whole bloody life,’ he laughed.

      ‘That makes two of us,’ I replied. ‘I was shit scared from the