Dogfight (11 page)

The tables had been turned and over the next few heart-stopping minutes Williams oriented himself and brought the Spitfire into a level descent over the Isle of Wight towards Bembridge Airport. With a massive jolt, the machine landed wheels-up and skidded along the runway as flames fingered their way across the engine cowling towards the cockpit's young occupant. Wrestling himself loose from the harness, he scrambled free from an eager funeral pyre. The Spitfire continued to burn until the fire found the petrol and it promptly exploded. It had been an eventful day for Williams, who only two years previously had been leading the rather staid life of a bank clerk. Two Royal Navy men who had been watching the tussle saw the stricken enemy bomber dive into the sea and Williams claimed his first victory of the war.

Gibson had already been in action that morning, destroying one Ju 87 and damaging another when he was scrambled just after 3.00p.m. to intercept enemy intruders near Lympne. Although born in Brighton, England, Gibson had emigrated with his parents to New Zealand as a four-year-old in 1920.
A fine marksman and successful sportsman in the pre-war period, he made contact with the enemy twenty-five minutes after taking to the air, destroying two aircraft.[15] In spite of the best efforts of Gibson and his fellow Fighter Command pilots, the three airfields had taken a good hammering. The New Zealander managed to bring the Hurricane home unscathed, only to park it gracelessly in a bomb crater.

By the end of the day it was clear that the campaign had entered a new phase. For Park the fighting had shown that when radar was operable, the Dowding System worked remarkably well. The speed at which airfields were repaired and the radar stations put back in action demonstrated a high degree of resilience. On the tally-board Fighter Command had come out ahead with thirty-one Luftwaffe machines shot down for the loss of eleven pilots and twenty-one RAF machines.[16] Nevertheless, concern was merited with regards to the intensity of the fight and the demand on Park's air units. Of his eighteen squadrons, a full thirteen had to be called upon and, of these, most were scrambled more than once. In total, 500 sorties were undertaken by Fighter Command and it was uncertain that this level of operations was sustainable with the resources on hand.

On the other side of the Channel, Göring gave the order for the commencement of the great
Adlerangriff
the very next day.

The weathermen of the Luftwaffe's meteorological arm had informed their leader of fine flying conditions, but the morning was overcast and England was wreathed in broken cloud. The main event was therefore pushed back until the afternoon of 13 August. Confusion and an inability to call back some Luftwaffe units resulted in Anzac skirmishes with the enemy before the principal raids of the day. Two Australians, Mayers and Glyde, were involved in the battle.

Mayers had joined the Hurricane-equipped 601 Squadron only ten days earlier. With this posting, the Australian found himself in one of the more colourful RAF units. The so-called ‘millionaires' squadron' was well known for collecting pilots from the ‘well-heeled' ranks of society. This menagerie of the wealthy and famous came about in the 1920s when aristocratic young amateur aviators came together to form a squadron in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, London—a voluntary active-duty force for supplementing the RAF. Airmen of 601 distinguished themselves by their
distaste for the usual discipline of other units. Disdaining the regulation black silk that lined the uniforms of the RAF's hoi polloi, the ‘millionaires' favoured a gaudy bright-red silk lining.

Hayter, who was in a sister auxiliary squadron for a period, noted that the well-connected pilots had a gold ‘A' on each lapel, though pilots like himself were only given a single ‘A' because they were simply there to ‘bolster the numbers'. Even so, some of the Anzacs were beneficiaries of the squadron's largesse. ‘In the auxiliary squadron, Walter Churchill was my first CO,' recalled Hayter, and since ‘we were just poor colonial boys ... he paid our mess bills. And free cigarettes too.' This was too good to last however, and when a replacement commanding officer appeared, he declared that ‘if you bastards think I'm going to continue paying your mess bills you've got another thing coming'. It was, in Hayter's words, ‘a hell of a shock'.[17]

The pilots' car collection was the envy of Fighter Command, with glittering examples of the finest automotive grace and power on offer. Long-nosed sports and touring cars were mandatory accessories for the red silk and gold lapel-badge wearers. Many sidestepped fuel restrictions by utilising the 100 octane gasoline from the aircraft bowsers. An illegal activity, but poorly monitored. Some pilots even owned their own aircraft.

Mayers' squadron's other claim to fame was its unusually high number of American pilots, including the famous ‘Billy' Fiske. The son of a New England banking magnate, he had won two Olympic gold medals: the first at the 1928 Winter Olympics, at the tender age of sixteen, as part of the United States' five-man bobsled team; the second as a member of the four-man team in 1932. Like most Americans in the Battle of Britain, Fiske misled British authorities by claiming Canadian citizenship. The handsome Sydney-born pilot Mayers was not an altogether unnatural fit in this glittering array, with his high forehead topped with swept-back blond locks and a background that included a considerable amount of time spent in London prior to the war and a University of Cambridge degree in his back pocket. As managing director of a London-based firm, he was more suited to this company than might ordinarily be expected. Moreover, as the campaign stretched into September and the squadron's losses mounted, its lustre diminished as more decidedly middle-class citizenry entered its ranks.

By
Adlertag,
Mayers could look back on only a handful of days in action, but thanks to his training in the Cambridge University Air Squadron he was
better equipped than many who entered the battle midstream.[18] He began 13 August with an early-morning scramble from Tangmere, knocked out a Ju 88 and heavily damaged another. Just after midday, the Sydneysider was once again ordered up as part of A Flight against thirty Me 110s south of Portland. His first attack on the formation was a six-second burst as he closed from 400 to 150 yards, but it ‘appeared to be ineffectual'. In the second attack,

Mayers' first reaction was to yank back on the control column, but the fighter was now only a lifeless metallic carcass. ‘The next thing I remember,' wrote the Australian the next day, was ‘falling through the air at light speed, and feeling my helmet [being] ... torn off.' He had baled out at 19,000 feet and, suffering from oxygen deprivation, clawed his way back to consciousness in the course of a 12,000 foot free-fall, finally able to open the parachute at 7000 feet. He survived the wayward peppering of an Me 110 and landed in the chilly waters three miles off Portland.

He was hopeful of rescue, since in his descent he had spotted a Motor Torpedo Boat (MTB) a mile distant. The vessel was moving in to pick up a downed Luftwaffe pilot not 200 yards from where Mayers was bobbing up and down. His confidence dissipated over the next twenty minutes as it became evident he had not been seen. His saviour arrived in the form of a baronet: Flight Lieutenant Sir Archibald Hope. The aristocrat was Mayers' flight commander and had returned to locate the wayward Australian. From his cockpit,

Mayers was right; the vessel's commanding officer, having rescued the desperate and exasperated airman, lamented the fact that the small vessel only gave him a relatively limited range of sight.

The medical staff at the Portland Naval Hospital X-rayed him and treated his shrapnel injuries, which proved to be superficial. A flight in a Fairey Battle delivered him to Tangmere nine hours after his adventures had begun. In his lengthy after-action report, he suggested that pilots ‘carry marker flares' and that organised air searches be required after an airman is shot down over the sea. His experience had confirmed once again the potential lethality of being shot down over the Channel.

Mayer's heart-stopping brush with death was not shared by Glyde. The Western Australian, who had been awarded a DSO in June, was scrambled with his Hurricane-equipped colleagues on the same morning. The sortie was too late to meet the main challenge, but an isolated twin-engine bomber was spotted and attacked. As the stricken invader made its death plunge into the Channel, other 87 Squadron pilots noticed that Glyde's machine was leaking copious amounts of glycol, a sure sign of successful enemy defensive fire.[21] When they next checked on the pilot's status, the ace with seven victories to his name had vanished. Neither Glyde nor his machine was located in the subsequent aerial search. Glyde, who, thanks to operations over France, was more experienced than Mayers, had been hit by a lone bomber and lost his life for it, while Mayers with only ten days in combat had cheated death in the air and then at sea by a hair's-breadth.

The next day the pace of Luftwaffe operations diminished somewhat and assessments were being undertaken on both sides of the Channel of their respective progress to date. Significantly, the events covering 12–14 August had revealed that the Luftwaffe was operating under a handful of important constraints centred on poor intelligence. First, the importance of the radar system was never fully understood by the Luftwaffe high command, with the result that future attacks were sporadic and unconvincing. The 100-mile gap that had been created on 12 August had been quickly repaired. Consequently, when raids were made that evening in the belief that they would
not be picked up by radar, the Luftwaffe was hit hard. This in turn led the Germans to mistakenly downplay the potential advantages to be had from all-out operations against the radar chain.

Second, attacks were made on targets that had little impact on the operational capabilities of Fighter Command. For example, the 13 August raid on Detling airfield, near Maidstone, had killed sixty-seven men and destroyed twenty-two aircraft on the ground.[22] By all accounts a decisive blow, were it not for the fact that the field was part of Coastal Command's inventory, not Fighter Command's.

Third, the Germans were never fully aware of the vulnerability of the Spitfire manufacturing facilities. In addition to the Hurricane and Spitfire Rolls-Royce engines being built at only two factories, the airframes for the latter fighter were by and large produced at one plant: the Vickers-Supermarine factory in Southampton. Dangerously close to Kesselring and Sperrle's airfields, this factory was falsely identified as manufacturing bombers.

Finally, Kesselring and Sperrle were overestimating Fighter Command losses. Tall tales of confirmed kills prevailed on both sides. Some pilots falsely boosted their successes, but most of the inflation was due to multiple claims on the same kill in fast-moving combat. One pilot might hit an enemy aircraft only to have others hit the machine before it was destroyed. An August interception by 54 Squadron of a lone Me 110 highlighted the potential for confusion and multiple claims.

The combat report chronicled the unusually protracted assault: ‘P/O Gray attacked from 100 yards. Firing long burst setting both engines on fire.'[23] The German machine refused to surrender to Gray's salvos, though it rapidly shed its speed. In fact, the low velocity of the Me 110 made it difficult for the other pilots to finish it off. The flight leader was only able to hole the fuselage. A flight sergeant ‘fired third and set the engines alight again ... This time the enemy was diving steeply towards the French Coast.' Further ‘bits and pieces fell off the machine' from the efforts of a pilot officer, but still the Me 110 sputtered eastward losing altitude. The fifth and last to hit the aircraft was a sergeant. George Gribble, as flight leader, signed off the document, noting that although the ‘machine was not actually seen to crash in the water by this time it was fully ablaze'.[24] Sometimes it was possible to accurately attribute success to lone pilots but often in the heat of a dogfight multiple claims were impossible to avoid, especially if more than one squadron was involved.

While the resulting exaggerated claims were troubling for Dowding in assessing the progress of the battle, it was an exceedingly serious matter on the other side of the Channel. The RAF was in the business of simply surviving; the Germans on the other hand needed to destroy Fighter Command to facilitate the invasion. Göring was certain, based on the vastly inflated figures, that Dowding must have stripped his other defensive forces, 10 Group and 12 Group, to reinforce the struggling 11 Group. How else could he account for Park's continued resistance in the south when his Luftwaffe pilots had allegedly destroyed the greater part of the RAF's fighter stocks?

The Luftwaffe hoped to exploit this apparent weakness by attacking Britain across a broad front, drawing the northern Norwegian and Danish-based Luftflotte 5 into the fray. The Greatest Day—15 August—saw the largest collection of aircraft gathered together over Britain. Göring's three Luftflotten had a dizzying 1790 bombers and fighters to hurl at Dowding's 351 serviceable Hurricanes and 233 Spitfires.[25]