Dogfight (28 page)

In all 1023 Fighter Command machines were lost in the campaign.[13] For its troubles the Luftwaffe lost 1887 aircraft of all types. The loss ratio was close to 1.8:1 in favour of the RAF. As many Luftwaffe commanders recognised at the time, the only way to wipe out Fighter Command as a defensive force was to achieve a much higher kill rate than their adversary. Clearly they missed the mark by a considerable margin. Only on a handful of days in late August were they able to achieve a degree of parity.

In the arena of fighter-on-fighter combat, the figures tip slightly in favour of the Luftwaffe. Overall, the German pilots were able to obtain a 1.2:1 ratio against the RAF. An unsurprising result given the fact that the German Me 109 airmen had only one target, Dowding's fighters, whilst the Fighter Command boys were divided between knocking out Göring's bombers and fighters. In particular, Hurricanes striking at bombers were susceptible to the marauding ‘snappers' lurking above. Nevertheless, this was much lower that the 5:1 target posted by some Luftwaffe commanders at the outset of the campaign. Successes by Me 109 pilots were nowhere near enough to bring Fighter Command to its knees, let alone Churchill to the negotiating table. New Zealander John Mackenzie in a post-war analysis asked, ‘Now what was the measure of Germany's achievement during the four months of almost continuous attack?'

The campaign hollowed out the Luftwaffe of some of its best airmen. The Germans lost a total of 2698 aircrew to Fighter Command's 544.[15] The disparity is a reflection of the fact that Allied pilots were attacking multicrewed bombers as well as single-engine fighters, while the Luftwaffe pilots
were for the most part assaulting single-crew Spitfires and Hurricanes, with a handful of two-man Defiants thrown into the mix.[16] In other words, Death's scythe simply had greater opportunities to take the lives of Luftwaffe crews than of RAF pilots. Göring's force never recovered from the loss of so many experienced aviators. Initial German success in the invasion of Russia papered over the deficit, but in the years that followed the impact of the 1940 losses became increasingly apparent.

By all accounts, the men from New Zealand and Australia more than played their part in this achievement, though as with the general situation across Fighter Command, the actual knocking out of enemy machines was concentrated in the hands of only a few of ‘The Few'. Over the entire Battle of Britain, it is estimated that the greater bulk of the claims were made by a relatively small number of airmen in Fighter Command. By one estimate, about forty per cent of victories were attributable to only five per cent of the pilots.[17] The reasons for this are manifold. In some cases, urgent replacement pilots were quickly ushered from the battlefield soon after arrival either through injury or death at the hands of more experienced Luftwaffe airmen. Their names appear in the Battle's lists, but their involvement ended prematurely. New Zealander Michael Shand, on only his second sortie, was knocked from the sky. He had never fired a Spitfire's guns before being hit.

Many Anzacs also found themselves in the handful of Fighter Command squadrons equipped with Defiants or Blenheims and were therefore unlikely to amass impressive kill sheets. Defiant pilots and gunners had a better chance of being shot down themselves than of destroying an enemy machine. The youngest Anzac to die in the Battle of Britain was Kiwi Sergeant Lauritz Rasmussen. In September, only a week after sewing on his air-gunner's badge, Rasmussen and his Defiant pilot in 264 Squadron were killed. He was only eighteen years old.

The Blenheim crews were mostly restricted to fruitless night-time operations. Notwithstanding the remarkable efforts of Michael Herrick, the greater number of airmen in these circumstances followed a similar path to that of Sergeant Colin Pyne of Nelson, New Zealand, an air-gunner with a Blenheim squadron. The unit's night patrols did little to deter the enemy and only emphasised the need for advances in airborne radar.[18]
Consequently, though he undertook many patrols, Pyne was unable to claim any successes over the course of the campaign. Blenheim pilot Alan Gawith in 23 Squadron had only one brief encounter with a German intruder at night and had waited fourteen months to do so. Some fifty New Zealanders and Australians found themselves in these Defiant and Blenheim-equipped units and for the most part ended the Battle of Britain with similar results.

Not only was the type of machine important but also where the squadron was based. In other words, being at the controls of a single-engine fighter was no guarantee pilots would find themselves in the thick of the action. A good number of Hurricane and Spitfire pilots were either based outside the main area of operations or arrived too late to play a significant role in the fighting. New Zealander Victor de la Perrelle spent the Battle of Britain with his squadron in the defence of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The unit's main task was escorting convoys and, though it was scrambled on a handful of occasions, saw no combat due to its distance from the actual fighting.[19] The successful pilots who became household names were usually deployed either at the heart, or close to the heart, of the Luftwaffe's main objectives in south-east England. The region covered by Park's 11 Group was target-rich and consequently pilots here, or in the adjacent 10 and 12 Groups, were more frequently asked to engage the enemy directly.

Therefore, of all the Anzacs that flew in the Battle of Britain, only a much smaller number had the opportunity to clash with incoming German machines. Of the 134 New Zealanders, only a quarter actually put in a claim for hitting an enemy aircraft and of the 37 Australians the number was closer to half. The Australians' higher claim rate was due to the fact that, proportionally, they had more men stationed within the main area of operations. In addition, they had only two airmen flying the ill-fated Defiants compared with nineteen Kiwis. Overall, the claim rates for the Anzacs makes impressive reading, and, relative to their numbers in Fighter Command, they made a very valuable contribution to the battle.

The motivation across all pilots varied considerably. In general, although their own countries were not being attacked by the Luftwaffe, many Anzacs saw Britain as the ‘Mother Country' and had a great deal of sympathy for their British colleagues and, therefore, fought no less determinedly. A few pilots reconciled themselves to their assigned role reluctantly, while many more willingly depressed the firing button, motivated by thoughts of revenge or coldly engaging in a simple ‘them or us' survival equation.

Farnborough-based test-pilot Arthur Clouston took to the air and shot
down two enemy machines driven by the desire to avenge his brother who had died at the hands of the Germans only months before. Pilots who had seen the results of the Stuka dive-bombing of refugees fleeing the German advance in France were under no illusions: it was clear that the Germans were not engaged in a chivalrous jousting match. The Luftwaffe's deliberate targeting of fleeing refugees in France prior to the Battle of Britain, and then the assault on London's civilian population during the early days of the Blitz in September, hardened the resolve of many to the task at hand.

This was buttressed by sporadic Luftwaffe attacks on defenceless airmen drifting earthward after baling out of their aircraft. Being shot at in this manner was a significant factor in steeling the resolve of Bob Spurdle, who felt that if the Germans had ‘taken the gloves off' he was under an obligation to do the same. In the end all pilots agreed that the aerial contest was a zero-sum game: either kill or be killed.

Regardless of their motivation, the more successful of these airmen fitted a fairly standard profile: before the campaign they had completed a long period of flight-time in their respective aircraft types; they had combat experience pre-dating the Battle of Britain; and the squadron to which they belonged had dropped outmoded inter-war fighting tactics and formations. Colin Gray was persuaded that pilots needed at least 100 hours in their respective aircraft types before being thrust into battle. Being handed a Hurricane or Spitfire during the campaign was of little help when a young airman had spent most of the preceding months in an antiquated biplane. Australian John Crossman, with less than twenty hours in a Spitfire, survived just long enough to secure a share in a bomber before he was killed.

Nevertheless, chalking up extensive hours in a single-engine fighter was often in itself insufficient in the white heat of the campaign. Kiwi Terence Lovell-Gregg was a supremely gifted airman. As a teenager he was one of Australasia's youngest pilots and had been in the RAF since 1931. With considerable inter-war operational experience in Iraq and then as an instructor in England, his insertion as the commanding officer of a squadron in July 1940 should have been straightforward and relatively risk-free. Lovell-Gregg, however, recognised that in spite of his flying abilities, he was inexperienced in this type of combat and more often than not passed operational command to younger, but battle-hardened, subordinates. This undoubtedly saved the lives of others but could not prevent his own demise on
Adlertag.

On the other hand, Olive's flying abilities were augmented by considerable
experience gleaned over France in the final days of Hitler's assault on the trapped Allied forces at Dunkirk. Consequently by the time the Queenslander was facing the German raiders in the high summer of 1940 he had already survived some of the worst air fighting the war would offer and was better equipped to face the battle for the skies over southern England than most.

Fighting Area Attacks and the formation flying of the pre-war years often lingered with squadrons to the disadvantage of many a young airman.[20] The pilots who by good fortune found themselves under the leadership of a forward-thinking commander unafraid to overturn old methods were blessed. Spurdle was one such pilot who entered the fray as part of Sailor Malan's 74 Squadron at Biggin Hill. The prickly but accomplished South African was one of the first to abandon the parade-ground ‘vics' drummed into pilots for the German-inspired ‘finger four' formation. Likewise the stilted and impractical Fighting Area Attacks were discarded by seasoned commanders in favour of looser and more intuitive methods. For all Lawrence's flying prowess, he realised that much of his own success was due to the leadership provided by fellow-Anzac Pat Hughes, who for ‘his prowess as a pilot and a marksman and his devout squadron spirit ... he must be classed with the other great names who flew in Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain.'[21] Airmen who did well often did so under the leadership of tactically innovative commanders.

Among the pilots who did get the opportunity to engage directly with the enemy, there were a select few favoured by the gods of war. In general, pilots of all stripes were seen as equals in the air and airmen took a pretty dim view of those who had a tendency to shoot a line. Top-flight pilots were usually modest about their achievements, realising that whatever skill they possessed, their accomplishments were dependent on a whole range of factors—from the dutiful maintenance of their machines by tireless ground crews, to the support they had from their fellow pilots in the swirling dogfights of September and August. Equally undeniable, though, was that a handful of the men were in a class of their own in the battle.

The seven Kiwi aces of the campaign—Carbury, Gray, Hodgson, Gibson, Smith, Deere and Wilfrid Clouston—accounted for nearly forty per cent of all New Zealand claims. The six Australian aces—Hughes, Millington,
Mayers, Curchin, Cock and Hillary—accounted for close to sixty per cent of theirs. What made all these airmen so lethal was their marksmanship; a willingness to engage the enemy at a seemingly reckless close range; a desire to push their machines right up to their operational limits; and a superior sense of their three-dimensional combat environment.

Then and today, analyses of the efforts of pilots from the British Commonwealth point out that colonial airmen had an above-average ability to hit their targets. Deflection shooting and accuracy were synonymous with these pilots. Why this should be the case is hard to establish all these years after the event but, anecdotally at least, some commentators have put it down to their hunting and shooting skills acquired on the farmlands and in the bush of New Zealand and Australia.

The Anzac aces, like others in Fighter Command, were characterised by an unflinching determination to get as close to the enemy as possible before depressing the firing button. Their combat reports are replete with matter-of-fact descriptions of unleashing a hail of lead from eight Brownings as they closed to within thirty yards of a Luftwaffe machine. Many pilots closed with the enemy, but these airmen finished their assault almost on top of their prey.

The ability to hit the target at close range and avoid machine-gun and cannon fire themselves in tightly contested aerial battles was finally determined by their flying abilities and bond to their machines. These exceptional airmen ‘flew by the seat of their pants'. In the decades after the Battle, Gard'ner confessed that he never felt a close affinity with his machine, but he noted other pilots, such as Gray, seemed to feel that ‘their aircraft becomes part of them'.[22]

Finally, situational awareness enabled the best pilots to avoid being killed while they amassed a large number of successes. In a swirling mass of machines the aces generally knew not only how to hit a target but also how to avoid becoming a target.[23] Pilots like Carbury and Hughes fell into this category, and the latter was only killed by a freakish collision. Although overall the Anzacs made up only approximately five per cent of Fighter Command, they supplied nearly a third of the top ten aces. Between them, this trans-Tasman trio of Hughes, Carbury and Gray accounted for close to fifty enemy machines over four months.