pilot Geoff Wellum described the racing sensations of air combat:
All at once, crossfire, heavy and pretty close at that. Bloody front gunner. My target, concentrate, the target. Looking at him through the sight, getting larger much too quickly, concentrate, hold him steady, that’s it, hold it…be still my heart, be still. Sight on, still on, steady…fire NOW! I press the gun button and all hell is let loose; my guns make a noise like tearing calico…I get the fleet impression of hits and explosions of the glass nose of my Dornier and of Brian’s Spitfire breaking away, its oil-streaked belly visible for a fraction of a second. Keep firing, Geoff, hold it. For Christ’s sake break off or you’ll hit him; too close, this. I stop firing, stick hard over. I even hear his engines as he flashes by inches overhead. Bloody hell, this is dangerous!
In mêlées in the sky, it was often remarkable how few aircraft either side destroyed. Over a Channel convoy on 25 July, for instance, scores of British and German planes exchanged fire, but only two Spitfires were shot down, and one Messerschmitt Bf109. RAF pilots had received scarcely any training in air fighting, an art the Germans mastered over Spain and Poland, and the defenders were now obliged to learn by experience. Early in the battle, it became apparent that the overwhelming majority of ‘kills’ were achieved by a handful of each side’s best men: the top 3.5 per cent of Fighter Command’s pilots made 30 per cent of all claims for aircraft shot down, and the Luftwaffe’s aces accounted for an even higher proportion of ‘kills’. Exceptional eyesight, marksmanship and nerve to get close were the decisive factors.
The RAF strongly discouraged the cult of the ‘ace’, and of personal scores, but the Luftwaffe energetically promoted it. Such stars as Adolf Galland, Helmut Wick and Werner Molders were said by resentful comrades to suffer from ‘Halsweh’ – the ‘sore throat’ on which they were eager to hang the coveted ribbon of a Knight’s Cross – as all three did when their score of ‘kills’ mounted. Galland, a supremely effective air fighter but also a selfish and brutal one, had no patience with weaklings in his command. One day on the radio net a frightened German voice wailed, ‘Spitfire on my tail!’ and then again a few moments later, ‘Spitfire still behind me! What should I do?’ Galland snarled, ‘Aussteigen, Sie Bettnasser!’ – ‘Bail out, you bed-wetter!’
Air combat, unlike any other form of warfare, engaged exclusively very young men, who alone had the reflexes for duels at closing speeds up to 600mph; by thirty, they were past it. Commanders, confined to headquarters, issued orders. But outcomes hinged upon the prowess of pilots just in or just out of their teens. Almost everything they said and did in the air and on the ground reflected their extreme youth; on 17 August Lieutenant Hans-Otto Lessing, a Bf109 pilot, wrote exultantly to his parents, describing his unit’s hundredth alleged ‘victory’ like a schoolboy reporting the success of his football team: ‘We are in the Geschwader of Major Molders, the most successful…During the last few days the British have been getting weaker, though individuals continue to fight well…The Hurricanes are tired old “puffers”…I am having the time of my life. I would not swap places with a king. Peacetime is going to be very boring after this!’ One of the despised ‘puffers’ killed him the following afternoon.
The RAF’s Paddy Barthrop said afterwards: ‘It was just beer, women and Spitfires, a bunch of little John Waynes running about the place. When you were nineteen, you couldn’t give a monkey’s.’ British pilots partied relentlessly at night, youth overcoming exhaustion. Pete Brothers said, ‘We used to booze dreadfully.’ One day when his squadron was stood down in bad weather, the airmen adjourned to the bar, only to find themselves scrambled when the sky cleared. ‘I shall never forget taking off and thinking, “That button…turn it that way…switch on gunsights …” We were all absolutely tanked. Mind you, when we saw black crosses, you were instantly sober.’
They cherished their aircraft as magic carpets into the sky. Bob Stanford-Tuck said: ‘Some men fall in love with yachts or some women, strangely enough, or motor cars, but I think every Spitfire pilot fell in love with it as soon as he sat in that nice tight cosy office with everything to hand.’ Similarly, Bob Doe on his first sight of his new plane: ‘Our hearts leapt! We walked round it, sat in it, and stroked it. It was so beautiful I think we all fell a bit in love with it.’ Fighter Command’s British pilots fought alongside contingents of New Zealanders, Canadians, Czechs, South Africans and a handful of Americans. The 146 Poles who participated in the Battle of Britain formed the largest foreign element, 5 per cent of overall RAF pilot strength. Their combat reputation was superb, rooted in experience and reckless courage. ‘When you seen [sic] the swastika or black cross on the aircraft,’ said one of them, Bolesław Drobi
Popular adulation was heaped on the aerial defenders of Britain, expressed everywhere airmen met civilians – as they often did, in evenings after fighting in the sky above towns and villages. The applause of ordinary people meant much to the pilots amid their exhaustion and losses. ‘There was tremendous kindness,’ said one young man afterwards. ‘It was a lovely feeling. I’ve never felt that Britain was like that again.’ Soldiers muttered jealously about the RAF’s ‘Brylcreem boys’; the Wehrmacht had a similar phrase of its own for the Luftwaffe – ‘Schlipssoldaten’, ‘neck-tie soldiers’. For the rest of the war, fliers of all nations retained a glamour denied those who fought on the ground.
Fighter Command was acutely sensitive to the loss of its experienced pilots: ten Hurricane aces – men who had shot down five or more enemy planes – were lost between 8 and 19 August, then a further twelve between 20 August and 6 September. Novice replacements were killed at more than five times this rate; casualties were especially high in squadrons that continued to use the rigid formations RAF official doctrine prescribed for ‘Fighting Area Attacks’. Units fared better whose commanding officers promoted flexibility and initiative. Pilots who flew steady courses died; those who stayed alive dodged and weaved constantly, to render themselves elusive targets. Three-quarters of downed British fighters fell to Bf109s, rather than to bomber gunners or twin-engined Bf110s. Surprise was all: four out of five victims never saw their attackers; many were hit from behind, while themselves attacking a plane ahead.
‘People who stayed in a burning cockpit for ten seconds were overcome by the flames and heat,’ said Sgt. Jack Perkin. ‘Nine seconds and you ended up in Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead in Dr Archie McIndoe’s burns surgery for the rest of the war. If you got out in eight seconds you never flew again, but you went back about twelve times for plastic surgery.’ Hurricane pilot Billy Drake described the experience of being shot down: ‘It was rather like having a motor-car accident. You can’t remember what the hell happened.’ Both sides suffered heavily from non-combat mishaps, born of momentary carelessness or recklessness by tired and often inexperienced young men: between 10 July and 31 October, 463 Hurricanes suffered such damage, sometimes total and fatal. As many as one-third of both Dowding’s and Goering’s overall losses were accidental.
Few pilots who bailed out offshore were recovered: a man in a dinghy looked pathetically small to rescue-launch crews scouring the Channel and North Sea. Ulrich Steinhilper gazed below as he flew back over the Channel from a September mission: ‘Our track across those wild waters became dotted with parachutes, pilots floating in their lifejackets, and greasy oil slicks on the cold water showing where another Me109 had ended its last dive. All along the coast near Boulogne we had seen 109s down in the fields and on the grass, some still standing on their noses.’ Nineteen German aircrew drowned that day, while just two were picked up by floatplanes.
The chivalrous spirit with which the British, at least, began the battle faded fast. David Crook returned from a sortie in which his roommate had been killed, and found it
