Dogfight (7 page)

A whisky later and he was transported to Hornchurch where two matters of interest were being discussed: Deere's ‘brush' with a German, and the He 59 air-sea rescue aircraft's true purpose. Rumour had it that, having exhausted his ammunition Deere had intentionally ploughed into the German fighter. ‘I may be a mad New Zealander...,' remarked a bemused Deere, ‘but not so mad that I would deliberately ram an enemy aircraft head-on.'[14]

Other pilots had also come across the sea-rescue aircraft and were uncertain how they should be treated, particularly as they bore civilian registration letters and Red Cross markings, and appeared to be unarmed. What made the RAF pilots suspicious was the heavy escort some He 59s were receiving from Me 109s. After some sea-rescue machines had been shot down, the Air Ministry directed that aircraft marked with the Red Cross engaged in legitimate evacuation of the sick and wounded would be respected, but those that were flying over areas in which British operations were being undertaken would be accorded no such ‘immunity'. The Germans, however, took no chances and subsequently armed and camouflaged their aircraft as they continued to save downed Luftwaffe and, on occasion, Allied airmen during the battle.

On the Allied side, a dedicated British air-sea rescue service would not be formed until 1941. In the meantime, Park set about organising the transfer of suitable aircraft from the Army to work with coastal rescue launches to pick up downed airmen as a stopgap measure.

In addition to the Kiwis, a trio of Australian-born pilots saw action on 11 July: John Curchin, Richard Glyde and Flight Lieutenant Stuart Walch. A morning attack on a convoy drew out Curchin's 609 Squadron. At the outbreak of the campaign the Melburnian was still relatively inexperienced when his unit was jumped by twenty Me 109s. He barely managed to scrape through his first air battle and a number of squadron members were less fortunate. By midday, 87 Squadron had joined the fray with Glyde as Blue 2.

Glyde, unlike Curchin, was already an accomplished fighter pilot with four victories to his name in France and a DFC pinned to his chest. Originally from Perth, Western Australia, he was denied admittance to the RAAF on medical grounds, forcing him to pay his own fare to Britain, where he obtained direct entry to the RAF. On this day, his first major engagement, he attacked three Me 110s near Portland. The first sustained damage to both engines. His next target was less easily dispatched, with the rear gunner shooting a large hole in Glyde's canopy and placing three bullets in his starboard wing-tip. Finally, he leapt to aid a fellow Hurricane pilot having trouble with another Me 110. Although the tail gunner's aim was for the most part wayward, he did manage to drill a bullet through the control panel, striking the armour plating near Glyde's head. Shaken but undeterred, the Anzac reeled in the fleeing intruder forcing the Luftwaffe airman to put his aircraft down in the water, where it sank moments later.[15] Meanwhile, Walch of 238 Squadron engaged a Me 110, also near Portland.[16] A native of Hobart, Tasmania, Walch fired three-second bursts as he closed to within fifty yards. He saw it plunge into the sea, with black smoke trailing from an engine. The Anzac had chalked up the squadron's first confirmed victory.[17] This was tempered by the loss of two Anzacs in short order.

Twenty-four hours later the Kiwis suffered their first loss when Aucklander Henry Allen, piloting a Hurricane out of North Weald, Essex, was hit. Charged with protecting convoys plying the Thames Estuary, 151 Squadron was ordered to cover a small armada codenamed ‘Booty'. Soon after, word was received of incoming enemy machines. At 9.00a.m. in broken cloud cover the squadron fell amongst the bombers.[18] The part-Maori twenty-six-year-old, with a cabinet full of sporting trophies and medals from his college days in New Zealand and three years as an officer for the Blue Funnel Line steamship company under his belt, was about to
engage the enemy for his first and last time.[19] Met by labyrinthine crossfire, the Hurricane's engine was knocked out of action, blades frozen in blunt testimony to the damage. Squadron pilots saw his machine glide seaward. The waters off Essex claimed aircraft and pilot.

The very next day, 13 July, an Australian was lost. RAAF Point Cook graduate Flight Lieutenant John Kennedy was covering Convoy ‘Bread' on its way to Portland. His fellow Australian in 238 Squadron, Walch, was close at hand when Kennedy spotted a lone Do 17. The Sydneysider ordered his section to intercept the bomber, only to be bounced by three Messerschmitts. Kennedy was hit and attempted to crash-land on the beach, but the machine stalled and he was killed. The first New Zealander and the first Australian to die in the battle had done so within a day of each other.

Over the next ten days the Luftwaffe employed the same tactics as weather permitted. Bombers and fighters would accumulate over the French coast and then in strength swing west in pursuit of a convoy. This pattern was repeated two to three times a day. With the advantage of surprise and numbers, the strategy was generally successful and culminated on 19 July with extremely heavy losses to Fighter Command—the greater part of which were suffered by Defiant-equipped squadrons.

Not all Anzacs were fortunate enough to find themselves at the controls of either a Hurricane or Spitfire. Alongside the development of these machines had been that of a third: the Boulton Paul Defiant ‘turret-fighter'. The Defiant was a curious beast, conceived as bomber-destroyer. The placement of a turret directly behind the pilot was its main point of departure from its more illustrious siblings. Utilising four turret-mounted Browning machineguns, it should have made for a fearsome combatant in the air war.

Wellington-born air-gunner Clifford Emeny was inserted into a Defiant and readily appreciated the potential when in training he was required to fire at a drogue. His pilot pulled the Defiant to within fifty feet and the young New Zealander opened fire at a rate of 2800 rounds per minute, shredding the drogue. His instructor offered fulsome praise: ‘There is nothing of the target left to count the hits. You have destroyed the target. Absolutely bloody perfect.'

Pushed along by the same Merlin power-plant as the Hurricane and Spitfire, the first Defiant prototype was test-flown in July 1937. Churchill
was a keen sponsor and, the following year, 450 machines were ordered to outfit nine squadrons. Nevertheless, in spite of Churchill's support, and its vague resemblance to the Hurricane, the Defiant would prove unsuited to modern aerial warfare.[20] The electro-hydraulically powered turret dominated the machine, adding an extra 1500 lbs to the Defiant's overall weight. The result was that it barely scraped past 300 mph at top speed and its manoeuvrability, compared with that of the German single-engine fighter, was terminally sluggish. A lack of forward-firing guns only increased the turret-fighter's vulnerability. Moreover, a mortally wounded Defiant was a death-trap for the gunner, who could extract himself from his coffin-like enclosure only with great difficulty.

Surprisingly, its unusual design meant that its first forays into the European air war were more successful than might otherwise be expected. Over the beaches of Dunkirk, German pilots mistook the Defiant for a standard fighter, only to find that their rear-on attack was coming under withering fire from Browning machine-guns. Luftwaffe crews were quick learners however, and soon the hunter became the hunted as enemy airmen discovered that frontal attacks and assault from below could be pressed home with impunity. Fortunately for RAF pilots, and the outcome of the conflict, only two squadrons rather than nine were equipped with Defiants by the time the Battle of Britain was under way—141 and 264 Squadrons. The intervention of Dowding, who immediately appreciated the limitations of a turret-fighter in terms of performance and ‘hitting power', strangled its development and production in favour of the Hurricane and Spitfire.[21] In total, nineteen New Zealanders and two Australians were deployed in Defiants as pilots or gunners.

In what became known as the ‘slaughter of the innocents', 141 Squadron's two-seater Defiants were scrambled against a formation of Me 110s harassing shipping. Of the nine aircraft, a third were piloted by Kiwis: John Kemp, Rudal Kidson and Gard'ner. None had any combat experience—this would be their collective baptism of fire. Only that morning they had been ordered forward to Hawkinge airfield, Kent. Just after midday they were sent on a patrolling mission 20 miles below Folkestone. The turret-fighters lumbered slowly to gain altitude, but only fifteen minutes into their flight they were jumped by a large number of Me 109s. Among those rolling out of the sun on top of the Defiants was ace Hauptmann Hannes Trautloft, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the attack on Poland and the invasion of France.

The eagle-eyed Luftwaffe airman spotted 141 Squadron flying in V-formation. He almost immediately discerned the Defiants' defining mid-dorsal turret and decided to take advantage of their complete lack of forward armament. The Fighter Command pilots and gunners never had a chance. Trautloft observed fragments of fuselage torn away as his cannon fire raked the flank of a Defiant. The machine exploded in a fiery inferno.[22] The inexperienced RAF pilots had not been briefed on the best defensive tactic to give them a chance of survival. Consequently, instead of circling the wagons, the Defiants persisted in flying on a straight and level course. The Me 109s dived on the hapless turret-fighters and used their momentum to sweep quickly around for further attacks. The arrival of a Hurricane unit prevented the destruction of every Defiant. Nevertheless, the results were devastating, and it is likely that Kemp and Kidson and their gunners were killed early in the action. Only three of the nine Defiants were to make it home, and one of these had to be written off. Of the crews, four pilots and six gunners were lost.

The sole New Zealander to survive the ‘slaughter of the innocents' was Gard'ner. He recalled years later how the Germans had gained the upper hand, bouncing them out of the sun. His gunner was most likely killed in the initial ‘thud, thud, thud' of cannon fire. ‘I could see a small naval vessel,' and he tried to get close to it but overshot by a wide margin. In the moments before hitting the sea he made the mistake of sliding back the cockpit hood and unstrapping his harness in order to make a quick exit. On impact, he was knocked out as his head bounced against the front and rear of the cockpit. He came to ‘in the water and struggling to get myself out of the aeroplane'. Blood from a deep cut across his forehead blinded the Kiwi, and then ‘suddenly I heard a voice saying, “Come on, I've got you, I've got you.”'[23]

Gard'ner was hauled aboard the rescue vessel, but his gunner went down with the Defiant. The New Zealander promptly passed out, waking hours later in hospital with his head swathed in bandages. The unit had been decimated. The handful of crew and aircraft that remained were transferred to Scotland and the other Defiant unit, 264 Squadron, was immediately pulled from action. Suffering head injuries, Gard'ner was placed on sick leave for three months, only returning to the squadron, which had been transferred to night-fighter operations, in October.[24]

Action was sporadic over the following weeks, but a couple of Australians saw heavy fighting. On 20 July, Walch was leading Blue Section of
238 Squadron on a standing patrol over a convoy south-east of Portland. During the midday flight he became separated from the other Hurricanes in his section, but continued his duties until required to switch to his reserve tank and head for his home field of Tangmere. Then he spotted a formation of fifteen aircraft coming in at altitude towards the unsuspecting convoy. The Tasmanian pulled his machine around and climbed to make an attack from out of the sun. Bombs exploded around one of the escorting destroyers as he ‘pulled the plug' of the fighter's booster, propelling it towards three Me 109s. At barely 50 yards he laid down a two-second blanket of lead on one of the German fighters. The results were instantaneous: writhing black smoke spewed from the engine as a telltale sign of terminal injuries sustained by the 12-cylinder engine. Confirming the diagnosis, the machine fell into a vertical seaward dive. Within seconds, the two remaining Luftwaffe airmen were doing everything in their power to get astern of the young Australian. ‘I pulled up in a steep stall,' he wrote in his after-action report, ‘and made for home.'[25]

At 6.20p.m. 65 Squadron, at its forward Manston base, was scrambled to intervene in a Luftwaffe raid on a convoy off Dover. Olive led Yellow Section. Although the enemy aircraft attacking the vessels were nowhere to be seen, he did spy an Me 109 about to attack an inattentive Hurricane in the distance. The Anzac approached the two aircraft from an almost head-on position with two other 65 Squadron pilots in tow. They were too late. The Me 109's cannon had sheared off the entire tail section of the Hurricane. ‘In an instant,' recalled Olive, ‘the pilot popped out of the cockpit like a cork from a champagne bottle.'[26] Either the enemy pilot had not seen the trio of Spitfires or thought he could outrun them because he then turned for France, flying in a straight line. At full throttle the Anzac overhauled the German fighter in a downhill run to Calais at close to 450 mph. ‘When his wings filled the gun sight ... I opened fire. Pieces, large and small came off him and flashed dangerously close.' Olive gave him a full sixteen-second burst of his ammunition and the Messerschmitt with its pilot ‘knifed into the water'. It was a bitter-sweet moment. On the one hand Olive had secured his first victory, but on the other he had killed another airman. In his memoirs he recorded, that after unloading the entire magazine of the Spitfire into the German, he ‘turned away in disgust'.[27]

In fact, Olive had been deceiving himself since he had first seen flying in France. When he looked back on the considerable action he had seen over Dunkirk in the previous month, he asked himself: ‘Had I destroyed any [Me] 109s? Several of the boys of my vintage were already claiming double figures.' His low claim rate was simply due to the fact he did not want to admit to taking someone else's life.[28]