Dogfight (23 page)

The 5 September operation had begun badly. Just after midnight the radio became inoperable, denying him the possibility of being guided into an intruder from the ground. In spite of the technical problems, he sighted a couple of enemy aircraft caught in searchlights. He destroyed a Heinkel in a five-second hail of machine-gun fire and moved on to the next target, a Dornier:

Nine days later he confirmed his status as one of the Battle of Britain's best night pilots.

In the early hours of 14 September, Herrick was ordered to patrol a line north of London. An hour into the mission he was vectored onto an enemy aircraft at 15,000 feet. Illuminated high above him by searchlights, the German crew were unaware that they were in the sights of the slowly climbing Blenheim. ‘It took me about 20 minutes to climb up to it,' stated the young Anzac, ‘I did a stern attack from slightly below and fired all my ammunition ... starting from about 200 yards and closing to 50.' Now aware of Herrick's presence, the panicked Heinkel crew opened their bombbay doors and jettisoned their bombs nearly on top of the Blenheim, and the rear gunner opened fire on the New Zealander and his crew, peppering the aircraft. Through his machine-gun-shattered windscreen Herrick watched the enemy aircraft plummet to earth and explode on impact. Back at base, he counted no fewer than thirty bullet holes in his machine.[15] But in spite of Herrick's prodigious efforts, defensive night sorties were little more than
an irritation to the night-time Luftwaffe missions that continued well after the Battle of Britain ended.

The element of surprise was certainly a factor in keeping German bomber losses to a moderate level during the attacks undertaken during daylight hours on 7 September. In all, the Germans lost forty-one machines, of which only fourteen were bombers.[16] Fighter Command was missing twenty-three aircraft with a total of thirteen casualties.

Overriding the casualty lists though was the new direction of the attack. Dowding and Park correctly assumed that the raid on the British capital was a sign of a decisive change in the German offensive, one which the commander of 11 Group was relieved to see. As he flew over London in his Hurricane the next day his mixed emotions were evident. ‘It was burning all down the river. It was a horrid sight,' he recalled. ‘But I looked down and said, “Thank God for that,” because I realised that the methodical Germans had at last switched their attack from my vital aerodromes on to cities.'[17] Rather than bringing Dowding's force to its knees, the bombing of London offered the breathing space the sector stations so desperately needed. It proved to be the turning point of the battle.

While the night-time raids proved costly, it was during daylight hours that the Luftwaffe most actively sought to bring Fighter Command to heel. Since the main aim of the aerial attack on Britain was the attainment of air superiority for an invasion, the Luftwaffe still had to crush Fighter Command, and this could only be attempted in the hours of daylight when its pilots and machines could be directly engaged. For the next seven days the raids continued unabated but without quite the ferocity of 7 September. The Luftwaffe fell into a two-day cycle of large attacks followed by a lighter day's operations to recover and prepare for the next two days of vigorous action.

Over the next couple of days of fighting, two newly arrived New Zealanders were ushered from the skies over south-east England. Both James Humphreys and Greg Fleming were with 605 Squadron, now based at Croydon. The Greymouth-born Humphreys had seen action with the squadron over France in May, while Fleming, a Scottish child immigrant to New Zealand, joined the unit a month later. The squadron had arrived just in time for the Luftwaffe's assaults on London. Their time on the battlefield was unfortunately short. Humphreys' first close call came after midday at 10,000 feet over Kent. Fifty bombers were engaged until
the Hurricanes were bounced by a number of Me 109s.[18] He managed to fight his way out of a tight situation but Fleming was not so fortunate, as he was shot down and had to bale out. The very next day, Humphreys also ‘hit the silk' after a tangle with twenty bombers and fifty-odd fighters near Farnborough.

The enemy were in five layers extending above 20,000 feet, and 605 Squadron positioned itself to deliver a beam attack. When the German formation turned directly into them, it soon became a head-on assault. Defensive gunfire from the bombers hit one of his colleagues, and a horrified Humphreys watched the crippled Hurricane half-barrel roll into one of the bombers. In a four-second burst, the New Zealander silenced the machine-gun fire of a Heinkel leading the third echelon. As he broke away through the incoming formation he was hit by a Me 110, its cannon fire sending tremors through his aircraft as it tore away the left-hand side of the cockpit and destroyed the throttle control. Amidst the blinding smoke and acrid petrol fumes bathing the cockpit, Humphreys glided the terminally ill fighter down to 12,000 feet and baled out. At 3000 feet he pulled on the ripcord to find his left hand a mess of ‘blood, flesh, bone and glove all mixed together'.[19]

Although the Germans had failed to kill him, Allied ground forces attempted to rectify this. As the Anzac drifted close to a Canadian Army camp he was greeted by Lewis machine-gun fire, holing his canopy and severing a rigging line. A welt on his chest and a hole in a breast-pocket were testament to how close he came to being killed by ‘friendly' forces. In hospital, Humphreys lost his little finger but the Canadians who had given him such a ‘warm' welcome eased his loss somewhat by reuniting the New Zealander with his Hurricane's escape panel, upon which he had painted a Maori tiki some weeks before. Humphreys had released the panel upon exiting his fighter and he was pleased to see its return as a souvenir of his adventures. Four weeks of convalescence was in order for the Kiwi and a return to combat operations would have to wait until 1942.

As grim as Humphreys' brush with death and recovery in a Torquay hospital was, it was far removed from the nightmare that faced Fleming. The man from Wellington had been flying as the ‘tail-end Charlie' for the formation on 8 September over Kent. The Me 109s which had failed to
knock Humphreys out made sure of their attempt on Fleming. His Hurricane had been hit and a fire broke out beneath him, turning the footplate into a glowing cooking plate. Worse was yet to come when the gravity fuel tank behind his instrumentation panel was struck. This was the aircraft's greatest weakness, as attested to by the number of Hurricane burns victims.[20] The burning liquid found its way onto his legs. ‘I could not open the hood,' recalled Fleming. ‘I turned the aircraft upside down twice, but still could not move it, as well as the fact that I was still being fired on. I could hear the bullets and on turning my aircraft upside down for a third time, pushed off from the floor. I was thirteen stone ten and very fit so the hood came straight off the runners and I went out wearing it around my neck.'[21] During his delayed exit the twenty-five-year-old suffered sickening burns.

Fire was an even greater terror for pilots than the frigid waters of the Channel. Pilots were not fitted out with flame-retardant clothing; their only shield was RAF-issued uniforms. Even in the heat of the summer many pilots became accustomed to covering their entire bodies in an endeavour to create a modicum of protection.[22] Yet some airmen demurred, feeling that they were better off without gloves and, in some cases, even flying boots.

With regards to the face, the breathing mask was a potential hazard of the highest order should fire spread to the cockpit and find the oxygen-rich apparatus. Perhaps the greatest dilemma for pilots were their goggles which, on the one hand, could fog up, fatally obscuring an airmen's sight, but on the other hand offered the best chance of saving a man's eyes in a fire.[23] Only five days earlier another Anzac had discovered just how vital they could be.

Richard Hillary eschewed goggles. He was of the opinion that the claustrophobic lens gathered dust, which made it more difficult to locate the enemy at high altitudes, especially when fatigue added spots before one's eyes and the windscreen of his Hurricane gathered specks of dirt. How under these conditions was he to sight distant enemy raiders? Hillary paid a high price for discarding his flying glasses, as well as for preferring to grasp the control column gloveless.

The Australian had just come off a big day of action on 2 September when he had destroyed two Me 109s and damaged two more. His luck ran out the following day. Over the sea east of Margate, East Kent, 603 Squadron was bounced by over 30 fighters.

Hillary picked up the narrative in his autobiography:

The pain he experienced from the summer sun striking his upturned face indicated he had serious facial burns. Thirty minutes in the water set his teeth to uncontrollable chattering. Within the hour he had lost his sight. ‘I was going to die,' concluded Hillary, ‘I had no qualms about hastening my end and, reaching up, I managed to unscrew the valve of my Mae West.' His suicide attempt was thwarted by the buoyancy of the parachute beneath him and an unco-operative spring-release latch. Over a three-hour period, lying on his back, the young Australian slipped in and out of consciousness. With almost all hope extinguished, hands hoisted him from the North Sea waters and a brandy flask was pushed between his swollen lips. His parachute descent had been reported immediately, but the rescue vessel had been misdirected, and was returning to base when the crew sighted the giant white jellyfish-like mass of Hillary's parachute with him ensnared in its tendrils. On land, the numbing effects of the Channel's chill waters receded and he was administered a pain-killing injection and transported to the Masonic Hospital, near Margate.

Fleming, after his own fiery escape, was mistaken for an enemy airman and shot at by local farm labourers. He landed near-naked, almost all his
clothing consumed in the blast-furnace of the cockpit. The burns to his hands were so severe that those who found him attached tennis rackets to them by spreading apart and tying the fingers to the strings lest they fuse together. A nearby gate was fashioned into a stretcher and Fleming, in shock, was taken to a local cottage hospital housing twelve expectant mothers, before being ferried to RAF Hospital, Halton, Buckinghamshire. The prognosis was not good and the doctors recommended that both heavily burned legs be amputated at the hip. Fleming refused and, in his own words, was ‘left to rot'. Blindfolded with burned eyeballs, he was banished to a small room and administered morphine four-hourly.[26] The tenacious Kiwi might well have completely despaired had it not been for the arrival of a soon-to-be-famous plastic surgeon.

Archibald McIndoe was the head of the Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Sussex; he was also a New Zealander. Hailing from Dunedin and a graduate of the University of Otago, he had made his way to a Harley Street practice via the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, in the United States of America. By 1938 he was a plastic surgery consultant to the RAF. Hillary described his first meeting with the great surgeon in
The Last Enemy:

At RAF Hospital, Halton, McIndoe initially considered Fleming too badly burned for plastic surgery but felt he would do well if he became one of his East Grinstead Hospital patients. Of the thirty-eight Battle of Britain men who came under the care of McIndoe, Fleming and Hillary were the
only Anzacs. As such they would enter what would become known as the Guinea Pig Club, so named because of the innovative treatment, procedures and post-operative care they received.

The standard treatment for burns involved the employment of tannic acid, a substance applied in industry to the stiffening of animal hides. Orthodoxy held that the hard cement-like layer created by its application would protect the skin from the air and thereby hasten the healing of wounds below. Shortly after it had ‘set,' the hard outer layer was chipped off by scalpel. The procedure had some merit in the case of burns limited to discrete areas, but was now being applied to burns hitherto not experienced, extensive third-degree burns. The results were disastrous when applied to large areas, such as an entire hand. In such cases, circulation was greatly reduced by the coating and infection and gangrene almost invariably followed. Moreover, the treatment deeply scarred the hand and twisted the fingers into a ghastly, immovable claw.[28] As Hillary noted soon after receiving the treatment, ‘My fingers were already contracting under the tannic [acid] and curling down into the palms.' If applied to the face, it could render the patient blind.