Dogfight (22 page)

The death of Hughes was just the latest in a series of grim losses besetting a teetering Fighter Command. Dowding was only too aware that the very
life of his force was slowly being wrung from it. The attacks on the sector airfields had produced casualty rates greater than hitherto experienced over Britain. Over a two-week period Dowding was faced with the grim reality of 103 pilot casualties, a figure that equated to a weekly wastage rate of ten per cent of his fighting strength.[46] In the seven-week period ending 6 September, Dowding's force shed 161 machines against 189 German aircraft of all types lost. Not only were the training units unable to keep up with the demand for pilots, but it now appeared that even aircraft supply efforts might have met their match. The bombing of the advanced airfields made them barely operable and raids on Park's sector stations brought them to the verge of foundering:

Park was of the opinion that, ‘had the enemy continued his heavy attacks against Biggin Hill and the adjacent sectors ... the fighter defences of London would have been in a perilous state.'[48] Then, on the day that Hughes was killed and his wife left grieving, London was set on fire. The campaign had changed direction again.

CHAPTER 9

At daybreak on 7 September, Fighter Command prepared for a continuation of the assaults of the past week. The morning was hot, the sky clear and sunny: just the sort of weather dreaded by the wary men of Fighter Command. Pilots and machines waited across 11 Group for the inevitable scramble, but the hours passed in relative calm, the eye of the storm. As midday rolled into the afternoon it appeared that the Luftwaffe might be taking the day off; then, at 4.00p.m., martial storm clouds began gathering in the east. Radar reports indicated that a build-up was under way and squadrons were placed on alert. Seventeen minutes later, eleven squadrons were scrambled. Ten and 12 Groups were placed on readiness.

Watching the massive German force depart was Göring, the corpulent commander of the Luftwaffe, who had arrived recently to take personal command of the operation. From the lofty cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez he stood with Kesselring, admiring the mustering and launching of his forces. The vast fleet of German aircraft numbered close to 1000, an armada never before seen in aerial combat. The twin-engine bombers rose from 14,000 to 20,000 feet and made up a third of the fleet. The remainder, deadly fighters, prowled at higher altitudes. Fighter Command assumed that the force would break apart and head for the sector stations, with ancillary assaults on aircraft industries. Instead it headed straight for the world's largest city: London.

The move from attacking the airfields to an assault on London was a course first embarked upon back on 24 August when the capital was bombed in error, an act that set in motion a series of tit-for-tat reprisals. When Berliners died under the British bombs four days later, Hitler's mood turned sour and he directed Göring to plan for an all-out assault on London. Up until this point there had been a general unwritten rule that civilian
targets were off-limits. In practice, though, the rudimentary accuracy of the bombers and the proximity of housing to factories, ports and railways usually resulted in some civilian losses. Bomber Command's continued attacks, small-scale though they were, increasingly infuriated the Führer. On 4 September, to a highly charged audience at the Berlin Sportpalast he declared: ‘Mr Churchill is demonstrating to us ... his innovation: the nightly air raid ... And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities. We will put these night-time pirates out of business, God help us!' With regard to the invasion, Hitler told his audience that, in Britain, ‘They enquire: “Well, why isn't he coming?” Calm yourselves,' Hitler proclaimed theatrically. ‘He is coming!'[1]

Still harbouring the mistaken belief that Fighter Command was on its last legs, Luftwaffe commanders, Kesselring especially, wanted to bring the remaining rag-tag elements of Dowding's force to the field of battle to deliver the decisive blow. What better place than London? Not only did the city on the Thames house a fifth of the nation's citizenry, but its great port was the hub of a transport network with spokes reaching out to the furthermost points of the island. The economic, cultural and political heart of the British Empire would be easy to find and hard to miss for Luftwaffe crews. It was reasoned that massed bomber raids would force Fighter Command to defend the capital, and there meet their demise.

Göring concurred, but had his own reasons for the assault: a wounded ego. He had always promised that Berlin would never suffer the indignity of enemy bombs, but in the wake of RAF raids, his stock with Hitler and the German people had fallen to a dangerously low point. Moreover, despite Hitler's public proclamation that an invasion was on the cards, whispers could be heard at the highest level that his enthusiasm for the venture was waning. Göring felt success over London would restore his tarnished prestige and perhaps still bring Churchill to the negotiating table.

Expecting the hammer to fall on the sector stations, the squadrons were unable to intercept the bombers until late in their run on the city and well after many had dropped their payloads. The vanguard pilots were gobsmacked by the Leviathan bearing down on London. ‘I nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit,' the leader of 605 Squadron exclaimed,
‘Staffel
after
Staffel
as far as the eye could see ... I have never seen so many aircraft in
the air at one time. It was awe-inspiring.'[2] In the face of impossible odds a mere handful of squadrons ploughed into the tsunami of enemy machines.

Two of the first squadrons on the scene were 501 and 504, flying out of Middle Wallop and Hendon respectively. Gibson was leading 501 when it encountered over 100 Me 109s. The screen was almost impossible to penetrate, although the unit was able to make a definite claim and the New Zealander was credited with damaging a fighter. A King's College old boy, Kenneth Victor Wendel had only arrived in south-east England in early September when 504 Squadron was transferred in from Scotland. His baptism of fire was short and terminal. On patrol south of the Thames Estuary, he was part of the formation's defensive rearguard, when six enemy aircraft dived out of the sun from above and behind. An Me 109 crippled his Hurricane and the machine fell from the sky in an uncontrollable dive, last seen by locals smashing into the ground near Graveney, Kent.[3]

Air-raid alarms were sounding in London, but the response was muted. The sky remained clear and warnings over the preceding weeks had been mirages. When the usual all-clear signal failed to materialise, Londoners looked to the heavens. ‘I had a view across to the east and I saw the planes...,' wrote one young Londoner, ‘They were following the Thames like a little swarm of flies. They puffed up some anti-aircraft fire all around them and as I sat there watching, the planes got more and more numerous. The clouds of smoke began to rise from the East End. Then the clouds gradually became one huge cloud.'[4] Bombs from the first wave fell mercilessly on the warehouses, terraced housing and the all-important target, the docks of the East End.

It was not until about 5.00p.m. that Fighter Command realised that London was the day's objective. The resulting aerial battle was on a titanic scale. One thousand enemy machines were engaged piecemeal by up to twenty-three squadrons. A grand but frightening spectacle was playing itself out above the upturned heads of Londoners. New Zealander John Morrison, himself an airman, was on leave in London during the attacks of September and was awestruck by the unfolding events:

The blue arena was a canvas stamped with the military lines of bombers in formation, but cross-hatched with the white cotton contrails of single-engine fighters peppering the sky with cannon and machine-gun fire. The black oily smudge of machines belching their last breath slashed across the summer vista, punctuated with the white anti-aircraft fire and the odd gently descending silk parachute. The odds against the fighters were formidable.

The commander of 43 Squadron dispatched two sections to attack the bombers while his own Yellow Section confronted the German fighters, in effect three Hurricanes against hundreds of single and twin-engine Messerschmitts. The results were predictable. The squadron leader was killed and the Anzac Dick Reynell was hit.[6] The South Australian Flight Lieutenant was one of Fighter Command's most accomplished airmen, entering the RAF in 1931 and then taking up a position as a test pilot with Hawker Aircraft Ltd in 1937. After the German invasion of Poland he pleaded to re-enter the RAF but was considered too valuable to let go. Only in the August manpower crisis were test pilots rushed in to shore up the shrinking numbers of airmen and he was shipped out to 43 Squadron. But his considerable talents were not enough in the face of impossible odds. An Me 109 immobilised his Hurricane, forcing Reynell to bale out. The parachute failed to open and he plummeted to his death.

Wellington-born Charles Bush hunted with the 242 ‘Canadian' Squadron, led by Douglas Bader. The fiery Bader had brought the unit back from despair after massive losses in France in May. When Leigh-Mallory received the call for support he once again attempted to assemble a Big Wing, which of course included Bader's 242, over Duxford, in order to hit the enemy with a powerful punch. As before, the idea proved more difficult to accomplish than hoped and the interception of incoming bombers failed, but at 20,000 feet elements of the Big Wing did manage to attack a formation of eighty-odd aircraft over the Thames. ‘On sighting enemy aircraft, I did a quarter attack on the rear-most bomber of the formation,' recorded Bush.
This and a subsequent foray against the bomber were interrupted by Me 110 fire. In the dogfight he damaged both an He 111 and a twin-engine fighter. The former insurance company employee's realistic tally was far removed from that of the rest of the force, which in total claimed an outrageously high eleven aircraft destroyed.[7]

On the ground, the Luftwaffe's bombs found their target: the Woolwich Arsenal. Home to manufacturing plants producing munitions for the army and RAF, direct hits immediately created a conflagration of ground-shaking explosions, soon followed by incandescent flames and spiralling dirty black smoke. Göring's next target was the London docks. The vital entry and exit point for the Empire's commerce was carpeted with bombs. ‘We passed under Tower Bridge and soon were on the edge of an inferno,' recalled a voluntary fireman on an Emergency Fireboat, ‘Everything was alight, tugs and barges were flaming and sinking into the water. All the timber of Surrey Commercial Docks was blazing furiously.'[8] The German machines laid waste to built-up working-class housing in the East End. A sixteen-year-old with the local Civil Defence confessed he was terrified, holding a fire hose ‘amid the burning buildings—I couldn't touch the buttons on my tunic because they were so hot. My face blistered. I don't think you ever get immune to it—the wreckage, the dead bodies. It was a kaleidoscope of hell.'[9]

Late in the afternoon, as the Luftwaffe departed, RAF pilots attempted to extract a measure of revenge. Leading 609's Green Section, Curchin was unable to put a figure on the number of invaders he saw and simply wrote ‘very many' in his after-action report later that day. The Australian managed to shoot down an Me 109 and damage a Do 17. Carbury was at the top of his game as he sighted ‘waves of bombers with fighter escort' looming above his squadron. ‘The sections were ordered echelon star-board. I attacked [an] Me 109 which burst into flames.'[10] This was the first of two definite kills and one probable bomber before he was forced to land having depleted his entire reserve of ammunition, petrol and oxygen. At 6.35p.m., fellow Kiwi Keith Lawrence dispatched an Me 109, but not before seeing 234 Squadron suffer the loss of Pat Hughes. It was a hard day for the squadron as the new commanding officer was also killed in the fighting. Within hours the unit had lost two of its most valuable men and four days later was sent to St Eval, Cornwall, to recuperate and make good its losses.

The inferno on the ground acted as a bright and beckoning directional
signal for further German aircraft. Luftwaffe bombers continued their runs on the city until dawn the following morning. In the eyes of an American reporter at the southern fringes of the capital, it was ‘the most appalling and depressing sight any of us had ever seen ... It almost made us physically ill to see the enormity of the flames that lit the entire western sky. The London we knew was burning.'[11] Compounding the difficulties on the streets was the release of code-word ‘Cromwell'. The massive raid on London, favourable tides and photo-reconnaissance evidence—revealing the assembly of invasion barges on the western shores of the Channel—seemed to suggest an invasion was imminent. Many took this to mean an invasion was in fact being launched, and church bells were rung and a handful of bridges prematurely blown up. In London, the ‘Cromwell' order added confusion to Civil Defence efforts when road blocks in the city were hastily erected, hampering the movement of fire appliances and personnel. By the time the raids petered out, 436 Londoners had been killed and a further 1666 wounded. The following night a further 400 Londoners were killed and on 9 September more than 370 lost their lives.[12]

The night bombing of London would continue unabated for 76 consecutive nights and splutter on thereafter until May the following year. These nocturnal raids usually numbered between 100 and 200 bombers at a time and operated in conjunction with continuing daylight assaults. Although they were less accurate than their daytime counterparts, they were relatively trouble-free for the Luftwaffe bomber crews. Cloaked in darkness, enemy machines were almost impossible to locate. The use of airborne radar to direct twin-crewed fighters onto an enemy intruder was still in its infancy and most operations in September were a hit-and-miss affair. Night-fighter pilot Alan Gawith's two-man machine was fitted with radar but, as he later recalled, ‘nobody knew how to use it'.[13] On average, thirty-one nightly sorties had been undertaken by Fighter Command over the fortnight leading up to the attack on London, for the beggarly total of three enemy aircraft claimed. Two of these were Anzac Michael Herrick's victims.

At barely nineteen years of age, the Hastings-born New Zealander was one of the RAFs most skilled practitioners of night fighting. A 1939 cadetship to Cranwell, Lincolnshire, saw him awarded his flying badge early in 1940, and, as part of 25 Squadron, he was immediately involved in
testing airborne radar onboard the unit's Bristol Blenheims. The Blenheims were a light bomber converted to night fighting for Fighter Command. Given the rudimentary nature of the technology at the time and the relatively slow speed of the Blenheim, the fact that Herrick took out two enemy aircraft in a single sortie was all the more remarkable.