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    The Few: Fight for the Skies
    The Few: Fight for the Skies
    The Few: Fight for the Skies
    Ebook235 pages1 hour

    The Few: Fight for the Skies

    By Philip Kaplan

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    About this ebook

    In this new pictorial history from Philip Kaplan, the perspectives of both RAF and Luftwaffe airmen are considered within the wider context of one of the most iconic and pivotal conflicts of modern history. The Blitz, primarily the bombing of London and the major cities of Britain by the German Air Force, lasted for fifty-seven nights from September 1940 into May 1941. Life under the bombing; the perspectives of German and British airmen; the experience of sheltering in the London Underground; first-hand accounts of the horror by survivors left behind; all these voices are consolidated to great effect, providing a suitable commentary to the rare archive photography on display.Accounts and photographs of some of the most notable participants caught up in the proceedings include; Al Deere, Geoffrey Page, Brian Kingcome, Peter Townsend, Bob Doe and Ginger Lacey.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 27, 2015
    ISBN9781473854437
    The Few: Fight for the Skies
    Author

    Philip Kaplan

    Author/historian/designer/photographer Philip Kaplan has written and co-authored forty-seven books on aviation, military and naval subjects. His previous books include: One Last Look, The Few, Little Friends, Round the Clock, Wolfpack, Convoy, Fighter Pilot, Bombers, Fly Navy, Run Silent, Chariots of Fire, Legend and, for Pen and Sword, Big Wings, Two-Man Air Force, Night and Day Bomber Offensive, Mustang The Inspiration, Rolling Thunder, Behind the Wire, Grey Wolves, Naval Air, and Sailor. He is married to the novelist Margaret Mayhew.

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      Book preview

      The Few - Philip Kaplan

      FEW

      Eagles

      Saturday, 17 August, was a day of sullen overcast. On both sides of the Channel, Fighter Command and Air Fleet Two reported only reconnaissance flights. At the airfields the pilots, after nine days of frenetic activity, caught up with domestic chores. In a farmhouse at St Inglevert, near Boulogne, Oberleutnant Hans-Otto Lessing, aged twenty-three, of the 51st Fighter Group, was one of several writing home for the first time since the Battle began.

      My dear parents, he wrote, …At last I have some time to write to you … Of course, we have a lot to do every day … sometimes two to three sorties … usually we are in the vicinity of London—if you look at the map, you’ll see the distance between the French coast and Dover. With a flying time of 1? hours and air battles as well—and a fuel shortage—you can imagine how difficult it is to get back.

      For all that, Hans-Otto had one triumph to record. ‘Yesterday I shot down my fifth enemy plane … not very much if you think of the many opportunities we get, but unfortunately not every plane we shoot at falls from the sky … Another time I had very bad luck having got to a good position I found I had no ammo left, but one gets experience even in running away … my enemy plane was the hundredth of the group.

      The English pilots seem to get less these last few days, but those few are fighting very well. The Spitfires sometimes give us the most astonishing aerial aerobatic display. I watched with great interest how one tore about among thirty Mes without getting hurt himself. These are exceptional ones.

      Pilots of RAF Fighter Command in 1940

      Regretfully, Hans-Otto Lessing brought his letter to a close: Well, this is a short report—one would have to write a book in order to give the whole picture. But this too had to be said: For me this is the most exciting time of my life—I wouldn’t wish to change places with a king. Peacetime will seem very dull after this.

      Predictably, few pilots took time from the wheeling chaos of the combat to set down their thoughts like Oberleutnant Lessing. The way they felt was more often expressed in a casual aside, a verbal shorthand shared only by initiates. Those with few doubts shared the ebullience of Pilot Officer George Bennions of No. 41 Squadron at Hornchurch: My God, life wouldn’t seem right if you didn’t go up to have one scrap in the morning and another in the afternoon. The more introspective felt the same misgivings as Flight Lieutenant Tom Hubbard, of 601 Squadron, Tangmere: We all knew it was like a game of roulette, backing black all the time. Our luck wouldn’t come up forever

      The few who kept diaries revealed little of the true emotions, in entries as terse as telegrams: Had a scramble today but they went home, noted Pilot Officer Eugene Tobin on 30 August. Did some practice flying and we were lousy. Went to Andover and drank. Then home. Pilot Officer Patrick Barthropp of No. 602 Squadron, faced on 15 September with a German armada stretching beyond the horizon, noted succinctly: Thousands of them. Following the afternoon sortie, he noted again: Still thousands of them.

      Both sides were anxious to prove themselves, but the RAF were at first more conscious of their limitations. Flying Officer Dudley Williams of 152 Squadron recalled that before his first combat he had twice been allowed to fire his eight Browning machine-guns into the sea for practice—and barely ten per cent of Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s pilots had undergone more stringent training. Most, unaccustomed to sighting their guns, opened fire at 600 yards, then at 200 yards, a surer range, broke from combat. All had been schooled to fly in rigid air display formation, and to home in on bombers in one of four standard Fighter Command attacks. No one had told us that was the most stupid thing on earth to do! said Bob Doe, then a Pilot Officer with 234 Squadron at Middle Wallop. … The change of tactics came purely by knowing that the one laid down was wrong … I learned that I had to fly an aeroplane through the gunsight; you do what’s needed to keep the gunsight where you want it.

      As Doe recalled it, his first victory, against an ME 110 over Swanage, Dorset, bore that lesson out. It was the first time he had ever peered through his reflector gunsight or even touched the red-painted firing button at the apex of the control column. It was then that the only advice his flight commander the Australian Pat Hughes, had ever offered him came abruptly back to him—Get as close as you can and you can’t miss—and in this moment he barely gave a thought to his adversary, the rear-gunner; hosing back fire until he baled out, only a thousand feet above the water And it was then that Doe felt ‘suddenly invincible’—although as a survivor he retained the knowledge that you could be shot down very easily, and you’re always shot down by the one you don’t see.

      Another Spitfire pilot, John Burgess, recaptured the psychology of the moments succeeding the two-and-a-half minutes that it took 222 Squadron to scramble from Rochford: You got that horrible feeling down in the pit of your stomach … and when you were climbing you still had that sort of peculiar tummy feeling. But once action started you were too busy and all you were interested in was avoiding getting killed or trying to shoot down the other aircraft. It was rather like a dare to some degree. You wanted to see how far you could go.

      An operations board of No. 609 Squadron during the Battle of Britain.

      Flight Lieutenant James B. Nicholson.

      Sergeant Pilot John H.B. Burgess, summer 1940.

      without coming to any harm."

      A relative late-comerto the Battle, Burgess still developed by degrees a veteran’s psychology. If you got caught and shot at and had to do a forced landing, you lived to fight another day … I think that the spirit of the successful fighter pilot was to ‘look everywhere’ and to never be intimidated by the number of enemy aircraft that were around because you didn’t realise at the time that they were more frightened than you were … they were mile from home, deep into enemy territory …if they were caught alone, they were finished.

      Every Luftwaffe fighting man would have echoed those sentiments. In the Pas de Calais, it seemed at times that the pressure was stepping up almost hourly. At Audembert, the new commander of the 26th Fighter Group, Major Adolf Galland, told his younger brother, Wilhelm, a trainee artillery officer, Things can’t go on much longer like this. You can count on your fingers when your time will come. Oberst Carl Viek, Chief of Staff to the regional commander for Air Fleet Two, remembered that no rest-days were permitted, no rotation of front-line units. The watchword always was ‘The last man shall go again!’

      Other Air Fleet Two pilots testified to that sense of strain. Towards August’s end, few worried as they would have done earlier if combat was not joined; that anxious eye on the fuel gauge made things all too fraught. Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, 54th Fighter Group: Blessed are they who leave space behind them, for they will see the Fatherland again. Leutnant Erich Hohagen saw it more starkly: The Channel’s a blood-pump—all the time draining away our strength. Hauptmann Walter Kienzle, of Galland’s staff, remembered a growing air of unreality with each successive sortie: You were only thirty minutes away from your base. You saw the planes on the ground, the bend in the Thames, the puffs of flak … and you flet ‘I don’t belong here’ And Lieutnant Johannes Steinhoff, of the 52nd Fighter Group, a future Inspector-General of the postwar Luftwaffe, thought more than once: The RAF seem so hesitant—perhaps they never realise how scared to death we are.

      The flimsy green combat reports flooding in to Fighter Command’s headquarters showed the punishment the pilots and planes routinely took. At one airfield alone, North Weald, three pilots of 56 Squadron had astonishing escapes. Pilot Officer ‘Scruffy’ Joubert, who was blown clean through the side of his Hurricane when his radiator exploded, mercifully pulled his ripcord just in time. Flight Sergeant ‘Taffy’ Higginson skid-landed at 100 miles an hour near Whitstable, Kent, and vacated his burning plane so fast he fell face down in a cowpat and broke his nose. Flight Lieutenant ‘Jumbo’ Gracie, joked for days that his neck must be broken, since he could no longer crane round in the cockpit, then returned from the X-Ray department white and shaken: "My God, it is broken."

      But all such encounters were the small change of battle, stories to be capped, in time, by any long-term survivor. For the chosen few there were apocalyptic moments, encounters which even the participants, in retrospect remembered with awe. Some called

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