FIGHTER BOYS
The Pilots Behind the Battle of Britain
Patrick Bishop

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2003, 2020

Cover illustration: Cover shows RAF fighter pilots from 32 Sqn. At Hawkinge aerodrome, July 1940 © Hulton Archive

Patrick Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780006532040

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780007381180

Version: 2020-04-06

Dedication

To Kelly and Bill

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Preface

Map

Prologue: The White Hart

1 Sportsmen and Butchers

2 Fighters versus Bombers

3 ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’

4 The Fatal Step

5 Winter of Uncertainty

6 Return to the Western Front

7 The Battle of France

8 Dunkirk

9 Doing It

10 Before the Storm

11 The Channel Battle

12 The Hun

13 Hearth and Home

14 Attrition

15 Brotherhood

16 ‘The Day Had Been a Year’

17 Autumn Sunset

18 Rhubarbs and Circuses

Epilogue: The Last Note

Picture Section

Keep Reading

Notes and References

Index

About the Author

Praise for Fighter Boys

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

Albert Ball (Imperial War Museum)

Mick Mannock (Imperial War Museum)

Hurricanes in ‘vic’ formation (Imperial War Museum)

Spitfire in flight (Popperfoto)

John ‘Killy’ Kilmartin (Imperial War Museum)

Number 1 sqn in France (Imperial War Museum)

Billy Drake (Imperial War Museum)

Paul Richey (Imperial War Museum)

The Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber (Imperial War Museum)

Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain (Imperial War Museum)

Pete Brothers (Imperial War Museum)

Al Deere (Imperial War Museum)

Peter Townsend (Imperial War Museum)

Robert Stanford Tuck (Imperial War Museum)

Michael Crossley (Imperial War Museum)

George Unwin and crew member (Imperial War Museum)

Brian Lane and fellow pilots (Imperial War Museum)

Me 109 (Süddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst)

‘Sailor’ Malan (Hulton Archive)

Geoffrey Page

Me 110 (Ullstein Bilderdienst)

Dornier 17 medium bomber (Süddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst)

Adolf Galland (Imperial War Museum)

Heinkel 111s under fire (Imperial War Museum)

Ground crews refuelling a Spitfire (Hulton Archive)

Pilots from 610 sqn. at Hawkinge (Hulton Archive)

Pilot with mask (Hulton Archive)

Members of 66 sqn. (Courtesy of Robin Appleford)

Rob, Robin, Pamela and Christine (Courtesy of Robin Appleford)

Robin, Christine and Pamela (Courtesy of Robin Appleford)

Moira and Sheila Macneal (Courtesy of Mrs Lesley Kingcome)

Tony Bartley (Imperial War Museum)

Denis Wissler (Courtesy of Mrs Edith Kup)

Edith Heap (Courtesy of Mrs Edith Kup)

Brian Kingcome (Courtesy of Mrs Lesley Kingcome)

Heinkel III over Docklands (Imperial War Museum)

Heinkel versus Spitfire (Hulton Archive)

Paddy Barthropp

Paddy Finucane (Imperial War Museum)

Johnny Kent and pilots (Robert Hunt Library)

Introduction

When I started writing this twenty-one years ago, there were still many Fighter Boys alive. As I write there are only two. All the rest have joined their comrades in the great squadron bar in the sky.

The book started off as a novel. I had just been terminated – with extreme delicacy – as foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph and restored to my old job of roving foreign correspondent. I was not sorry to leave executive life but wanted a break before going back on the road, and my editor agreed to a sabbatical. I headed off to Paris, rented a small flat in the rue du Cherche-Midi and spent my days writing and my evenings hanging out with other struggling literary types. I did not have to look hard for a story. I spent the first part of my childhood in Charing, Kent, before the family moved to Raynes Park in southwest London. The Battle of Britain was fought in the skies above these places, and the spirit of the event seemed somehow to live on in them, despite the fact that it had taken place twelve years before my birth. The narrative featured a romantic Polish fighter pilot, a roguish Anglo-Irish soldier-adventurer and a love triangle. No one was interested in the novel, but Michael Fishwick at HarperCollins saw something he liked and suggested that I forget fiction and concentrate on fact. It was a good idea and the timing was perfect.

The Battle of Britain comes and goes in the national memory, and this was one of the dim periods. No book, film or TV show that captured the public imagination had appeared for a while. Plenty had been written, but there seemed to me to be something missing from the story. It was the pilots themselves. Yes, a number of autobiographies had appeared in the years after the war, but they were products of their time, and not much more revealing of the inner life of the authors than a Boy’s Own Paper yarn. I wanted to know who they really were and why they did what they did. These questions were answered brilliantly in a book that appeared at about the same time as mine. Geoffrey Wellum was one of the many pilots I interviewed, and when he told me that he had written his own book, I left him to speak for himself. The result was First Light, which will endure as one of the great accounts of the experience of war in the air.

Geoffrey’s book brought the story back to what for me was the essential. The literature of the Battle of the preceding years had boiled the business down to a matter of machines, technology, organisation, strategic and tactical decision-making and the like. This approach tended to diminish the role of the pilots, which I saw as being crucial. The Battle of France had shown that you could have all the material advantages and still lose. What mattered was the character, motivations and morale of the participants.

At that time there were still plenty of survivors with whom to talk about these things. Over a couple of years, I criss-crossed the country. The men I met were, as the propaganda of the day proclaimed, a mixed bunch, from all backgrounds and regions. In some respects, they were all the same. They were almost all of them modest, courteous and good-humoured. Some were just seeing me out of politeness. Others spoke freely and openly. It was not facts I was after so much as recollections of mood and atmosphere. A few I encountered several times and a sort of friendship developed. I grew particularly fond of Billy Drake, a veteran of the Battles of France and Britain and the desert air campaign in North Africa. We had lunch or dinner occasionally, and I took him down to his old stomping ground at Tangmere. As he talked in his gentle, amused way I could easily discern in his handsome old face the young paladin of sixty years before.

Through his testimony, and that of many others, I tried to give an impression of what the Battle of Britain felt like for those who fought it. When Peter Brothers, one of the great figures of the fighter war, said in a speech at a veterans dinner that the book had ‘reminded us of who we were’, I felt that perhaps I had succeeded.

Preface

This book is an attempt to answer a question that has fascinated me since I was a child. I grew up in Kent and London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Second World War was still a real presence. There were daily reminders of it in the weed-choked gaps between houses where German bombs had fallen and the muddy Anderson shelters that could still be found in suburban back gardens.

My first years were spent in the village of Charing. One of my earliest memories is of walking with my father, mother and sister through a ground mist of bluebells in Long Beech woods on the ridge above the village, close to the Pilgrim’s Way. Not long before the skies overhead had been a battleground. Occasionally my playmates and I found cartridge cases rusting underneath the ferns that we imagined had tumbled from the heavens during the fighting. Later I learned that a fighter pilot had crashed in flames into Long Beech after being shot down in the autumn of 1940.

We boys knew all about the Battle of Britain from small, square comic books, describing the great events of the war, that we bought eagerly as soon as they appeared in the village newsagent. They were our first history books. There, for the first time, we met heroes other than our fathers. It was the fighter pilots who hijacked our imaginations. We acted out their deeds in our games and dreamed about being them when we grew up. Their style and dash made them much more glamorous than the earthbound drudges of the infantry. Adults seemed to think so too. The Battle of Britain was mythologised before it was even over and those who took part in it were bathed in the glow of the legend.

At adolescence you shed your old heroes and get a new set. For a while it was slightly embarrassing to recall the passion that the silhouette of a Hurricane or the smudged snapshot of a young pilot once provoked. The grown-ups also seemed to have moved on. This was the Sixties. Men in uniform were now the targets of mockery.

Then, in the funny way that the recent past becomes suddenly almost as remote as the Dark Ages, the pilots slipped into history. There were plenty of books about the battles they fought and their crucial importance to the twentieth century. But they themselves grew obscure, blurred and monochrome like the photographs they took of each other, always smiling, as they hung about at dispersal, waiting to take off.

In the pages that follow I have tried to colour in the picture and to answer the question: What were the Fighter Boys really like? My researches have been helped by the generosity of many people. I am particularly grateful to Malcolm Smith of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association for pointing me to the veterans whose reminiscences enrich this story and answering many queries with his celebrated kindness, good humour and patience. The survivors are men of their time. Everyone I approached was unfailingly courteous, helpful and hospitable. Meetings were invariably a pleasure. The Fighter Boys retain their joie de vivre. The contribution of individuals is made clear in the text, and to each of them I give my thanks. Without them the book could not have been written. I would like to make special acknowledgment to Group Captain Billy Drake, Air Commodore Peter Brothers and Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris for the repeated calls I made on them. Group Captain John Cunningham, Hugh Heron, Squadron Leader Jocelyn Millard, Group Captain Anthony O’Neill, Wing Commander Harbourne Stephen and Flight Lieutenant William Walker were also generous with their time.

I was fortunate to be given access to several unpublished texts. Among them was Tim Vigors’s splendid autobiography, which has yet to appear in print, a situation which I hope will soon be rectified. I am also grateful to the Beaumont family for allowing me to see S. G. Beaumont’s Reminiscences, to the Fenwick family for sending me Charles Fenwick’s account of a young pilot’s life, Dear Mother, and to Michael Butterworth for enabling me to see Group Captain Frank Carey’s personal history. Squadron Leader Dennis Armitage supplemented his talk with me with his written account of the summer of 1940. Edith Kup was kind enough to spend a wintry afternoon filling in some of the gaps in the story of her love affair with Denis Wissler and to allow me to see his letters. Valerie Preston shared with me some of her souvenirs of the White Hart and Robin Appleford has allowed me to reproduce some glimpses of off-duty life in 66 squadron.

I would also like to thank Mrs Lesley Kingcome, her mother Sheila, her daughter Samantha and her son Gavin for their hospitality in Devon and for their memories of the late Brian Kingcome, as well as for permission to reproduce the photographs that appear here and to quote from his memoir, A Willingness to Die. I am grateful, too, to Sarah Quill for talking to me about her father Jeffery and for showing me letters from the family archive, and to Yvonne Agazarian for sketching in some details of her brother, Noel.

Our understanding of the ethos of Fighter Command has been helped greatly by the work of the Imperial War Museum, which more than 20 years ago set out to record the testimony of many of those engaged in the air battles of 1940 and preserve them in its sound archive. These interviews have provided much fascinating material and I am grateful for permission to reproduce extracts. The staffs of the Sound Archive, Department of Documents and Printed Books, Photograph Archive and Film and Video Archive were always helpful and efficient. I also want to thank Gordon Leith and his team at the Department of Research and Information Services at the RAF Museum, Hendon and the staff of the Public Record Office in Kew for their patience and the hard work they did on my behalf. Jean Buckberry was a gracious guide to the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell and its library. The staff of RAF, Benson, provided me with the records of the Oxford University Air Squadron in the interwar years.

In another, very different, area of research, I would like to thank Rod Dean, himself a former RAF fighter pilot, for taking me through the basic manoeuvres of a dogfight in a Harvard trainer in the skies above Tangmere and for explaining the principles of air fighting.

My task would have been much more difficult if it were not for the work done by several aviation historians of the period. I am indebted to Ken Wynn for the definitive research contained in Men of the Battle of Britain and to Christopher Shores and Clive Williams for the wealth of detail found in their two-volume Aces High. The chronology was greatly aided by reference to Francis K. Mason’s Battle Over Britain. The writings of Norman Franks, H. Montgomery Hyde, John James, Dr Tony Mansell, Dilip Sarkar, Richard C. Smith and John Terraine were always illuminating.

Thanks are due to the Grub Street team, who continue to ensure that the voices of those who fought the Second World War are heard, for permission to quote from Dennis David’s My Biography, and Shot Down In Flames by Geoffrey Page, to Hutchinson for extracts from Flying Start by Hugh Dundas, reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd, who also allowed me to use passages from Alan Deere’s memoir Nine Lives. Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp allowed me to make use of his autobiography Paddy. I am also grateful to Cassell Military for letting me reproduce parts of Paul Richey’s classic, Fighter Pilot.

Franziska Thomas put me in touch with German Luftwaffe veterans and was a skilful translator of my talks with them. My friend Sophia Coudenhove was a model researcher, a shrewd and indefatigable toiler in the archives and a source of cheer. Nick Farrell, Harry de Quetteville and Hugh Schofield gave encouragement and ideas when the going got heavy. Charles Moore, Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Alec Russell, Foreign Editor, were generous and understanding bosses, and my colleague Ian Jones took the author photograph. My gratitude is due to Leslie Bonham Carter for providing a wonderful working environment at Bussento at a crucial stage of writing.

In closing I would like to mention my late father, Ernest Bishop, himself an RAF man, in whose endlessly-leafed through wartime photograph albums the germ of this project perhaps lies. It would have lain dormant, however, were it not for the intervention of my agent David Godwin, who devoted his great talent and energy to getting Fighter Boys airborne. The process was helped enormously by the professionals at HarperCollins. I would like to thank Michael Fishwick for his enthusiasm and backing, Kate Johnson for her intelligent appreciation of the subject, Mary Ore and Peter Ford for their meticulous editing and Melanie Haselden for the care she took over the picture selection.

The last acknowledgement should really have come first. My eternal gratitude, Marie darling, for your support and – how shall I put this? – tolerance. Now it is your turn.

Map

Prologue: The White Hart

At 9 p.m. on Thursday, 15 August 1940, in a low-beamed, tile-hung pub in the Kentish village of Brasted, the conversation faded as a radio was switched on and the familiar pulse of the electronic time signal counted down the seconds to the main BBC news broadcast of the evening.

The voice of the announcer was calm but the events he described could not have been more dramatic. Throughout the day huge formations of German bombers, protected by large numbers of fighter escorts, had been crossing the Channel unloading cargoes of high explosive on military and industrial targets across south-east England.

The report was heard in silence until the newsreader revealed the day’s score. At least 182 enemy aircraft had been destroyed, he claimed, against British losses of only 34 fighters. There was a burst of cheering and a surge to the bar for celebratory drinks. As the radio was switched off the noise in the pub’s stone-flagged bars climbed back up to its normal convivial level.

Most of the men in the White Hart Hotel that evening were pilots from the fighter station at Biggin Hill, seven miles away through ragged, dusty-green lanes, across wheat fields ripened to the colour of wet sand. Watching them was an American journalist who had driven down from London that afternoon. In his report he wrote that he ‘found it incredible that these noisy youngsters were in fact front-line troops, even then in the thick of battle’.

It was true. The boisterous young men, tankards and cigarettes in hand, the top buttons of their slate-blue uniform tunics undone to show the world they were fighter pilots, had been on duty since the first light of what had been an unusually misty summer morning. Some had been in action three times.

The day had seen the most intense air fighting in history. The pilots had won a remarkable victory, though not as great a one as the official figures suggested. In fact seventy-eight German aircraft had been knocked down. It was less than half the number claimed, but there was no doubt that the Luftwaffe had been made to suffer.

Half of the men were from 32 Squadron. At the centre of the crowd was the new commander, Flight Lieutenant Michael Crossley, thin and dark-haired, with deep-set humorous eyes, who at six foot two was half a head taller than the other pilots. Before leading the men off, as the dusk thickened, for pints of the warm sudsy Page & Overton bitter that the White Hart’s landlady Kath Preston served from wooden casks, he had recorded the events of the day.

Down to Hawkinge 1 p.m. and from then on had a remarkably blitzy afternoon. Chased something up to Harwich and got mixed up with 109s going home. Got none. They got Grubby Grice instead who descended into the sea…back to Biggin to refuel. Off to Portsmouth and attacked thousands of 88s and 110s, got three. Refuel again and attack thousands of 17s who were beating up and bombing Croydon. Slapped down seven. ‘Polly’ Flinders took training flight out and he and Humph slapped down one each. Day’s bag twelve.¹

The 109s mentioned in this laconic entry were the Messerschmitt fighter escorts shepherding the fleets of raiders that arrived in successive waves from late morning. The ‘88s’ were Junkers 88s, twin-engined medium bombers. The ‘110s’ were Messerschmitt 110s, twin-engined fighters, and ‘17s’ were Dornier 17s, another medium bomber. The Germans had come in unprecedented numbers, launching attacks across an 800-mile front that reached from Edinburgh to Exeter in an effort to overwhelm Britain’s air defences and prepare the way for invasion.

The main engagement of 32 Squadron came late in the day. Shortly after 6 p.m., as the sun slipped westward, a force of Me 110s and 109s crossed the Kent coast near Dungeness and raced towards what they thought to be the RAF base at Kenley, a vital station in the RAF defensive system. A mistake in navigation meant they dropped their bombs on Croydon aerodrome instead. The effect was devastating. The bombs crashed between buildings. The blast rolled back and forth to maximum destructive effect. The passenger terminal, which before the war had been a symbol of all that was hopeful and positive about the new world of aviation, was wrecked. Sixty-eight people were killed, all but six of them civilians. There had been no warning. The air-raid sirens sounded fifteen minutes after the attack began.

The streets around the aerodrome were full of people. Newspapers had warned that morning that the air fighting of the previous few days had been only a prelude to the real battle. Invasion fears were excited by the discovery of parachutes scattered across the Midlands and Scotland – but no parachutists. The sight of the bombers sent people running to the earth-and-corrugated-iron shelters they had dug in their back gardens. Others were too absorbed in the drama to take cover. Mr H. J. Edgerton of Couldson watched the Messerschmitts flash past, seemingly only a few feet over the roof of his mock-Tudor home, as ‘about 20 Hurricanes and Spitfires streaked after them. Our fellows attacked them from below and roared up under them in terrific power climbs.’ It was strangely exciting. The engines were ‘screaming deafeningly’. The aeroplanes flew perilously close to each other and ‘time after time I thought the RAF were going to ram the bombers but they swept past them’.²

On leaving, the Luftwaffe raked its nails across Croydon’s homely, lower-middle-class face. Bombs tumbled into the streets, ripping up tarmac, blowing out windows and tearing off roofs. A woman emerged from her shelter to find nappies drying on the line shredded by machine-gun bullets. A doomed bomber piled into a row of semis, peeling away the walls, putting on display the modest lives being lived inside.

The Hurricanes of 32 Squadron and Spitfires of 610 Squadron had been unable to block the attack, though they shot down several of the raiders as they ran for home. Despite the deaths and the devastation there were few recriminations about the lack of warning or the level of protection the anti-aircraft defences and the air force had been able to provide. On the contrary, there was intense pride in the sight of the fighters charging in to attack. It seemed to Mr Edgerton that the British pilots had deliberately held their fire for several minutes, ‘because of the danger of bringing the bombers down on the thickly populated district’.

In fact no such restraints were imposed either by the controllers directing the defences or by the pilots themselves. The assumption of selflessness was revealing. Already, after only a few weeks of the air war over Britain, the pilots of Fighter Command were bathed in the light of nobility. The organization was just four years old. Before the spring of 1940 fighter pilots were known as a small, vaguely glamorous elite. Their role in the fighting in France had been peripheral, and, in the great drama of the Dunkirk evacuation, somewhat contentious. Now, with Britain facing possible extinction, they were at the centre of the national consciousness, turning day by day into the heroes of a salvation legend. When people spoke about them it was in an increasingly proprietorial way touched with familial affection. First they were ‘our boys’. Then, by midsummer, they were ‘fighter boys’. The name conveyed everything: their youth, their job, their dash – and the warm regard in which they were held. ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, the pilots’ austere commander, was the first to use it officially, writing in June a letter of congratulation to his ‘dear Fighter Boys’.

By the end of the summer everyone in Britain was in love with them. The air battles of 1940 were intimate affairs. Unlike any external war Britain had been engaged in in the previous thousand years, this one was fought in the sight of the inhabitants of the island, over the territory the pilots were giving their lives to defend. Combat took place above the monotonous roofs of London suburbs, the old market towns and villages of Kent, Sussex and East Anglia, the fields and orchards of the Home Counties. Those below had only to look up to see an unprecedented spectacle: huge masses of bombers and fighters skidding across the cerulean summer sky, scribbling white vapour trails on its placid surface and stitching the blue with the red and gold of cannon and tracer. It was thrilling, and from a distance beautiful and unreal. Then a Heinkel would falter, stagger out of formation, slide into a stricken dive; a Hurricane would spurt flame, roll on to its back and spin down in frantic spirals, and with a final flash and boom the violence reached earth in an ugly tangle of scorched metal and roasted bodies.

The pilots fighting the battles lived among those they were defending. At 6.40 p.m. that Thursday, just outside Sevenoaks, Michael Crossley caught up with one of the Me 110s that had raided Croydon and set it on fire, sending it crashing down near the pleasant village of Ightham. Two hours later he was accepting drinks from locals in the pub, a few miles from where workers were clearing the wreckage and retrieving the corpses of the dead.

The Battle of Britain had many of the characteristics of a siege. Everyone inside the enclave, active or passive, soldier or civilian, was a defender. The closeness this engendered could sometimes be almost unbearable. The girlfriend of Flying Officer Douglas Grice, the ‘Grubby’ of Crossley’s report, was a Waaf at Biggin Hill. The buzz that her man had ‘gone in’ reached her in a break between driving pilots out to their aircraft. Grice was badly burned but recovered. There were much worse stories. On a later occasion another Waaf, Edith Heap, who worked in the Debden control room, froze as a voice over the Tannoy reported ‘Blue Four’ was falling into the sea in flames. She knew, without waiting for confirmation, that the man she loved and was about to marry was dead.

Looking up at the wheeling Spitfires and Hurricanes, ordinary people imagined their own sons or brothers at the controls. Sometimes it was true. The mother of Tim Elkington, a young pilot with 1 Squadron, watched from the balcony of her flat on Hayling Island as he was shot down, baled out and drifted perilously over the sea before finally landing safely.

But you did not need ties of blood or romance to feel a particular bond with the Fighter Boys. The backgrounds of the few thousand pilots flying Hurricanes and Spitfires in the summer of 1940 reflected the social composition of the nation, a point that was emphasized by official and unofficial propagandists. ‘The most striking thing about the fighter pilots is their ordinariness,’ wrote a war artist who spent months among them. ‘Just you, I, us and co.; ordinary sons of ordinary parents from ordinary homes.’³ Fighter Command was perhaps the most motley elite ever to exist in the British military. In 32 Squadron, Crossley had been at Eton. John Proctor had left school at fourteen to become an RAF apprentice. Many of those standing in the pub had been in the RAF reserve before the war, training in their spare time from their often mundane jobs. Oliver Houghton had been a fitter in a Coventry factory. William Higgins was a teacher in a Derbyshire village school.

Their interests and attitudes were as broad as their backgrounds. Fighter pilots might be philistines or intellectuals, bon vivants or ascetics, pious or godless, cynical or trusting. There were some whose dominant trait of recklessness or aggression or amiability made them stand out, but most were too ordinarily complex to be pigeonholed. Fighter squadrons were collections of individuals. The nature of the fighting made it so. Once combat began, a pilot was usually on his own, beyond the control of his commander and making fateful decisions alone.

There were, though, strong affinities and common characteristics that bound the bunch together. The most potent was a love of flying. Speaking about flying, and when occasionally they wrote about it, the pilots dropped their usual clipped understatement for the language of passion. It was an obsession and an addiction and aeroplanes were far more than simply machines. They had quasi-human qualities. They could be brutish and heavy or beautiful, fragile and sensitive. If it was love, it was nearly always love at first sight. The pilots’ reminiscences are full of lyrical memories of the first encounter, when the flying circus arrived in town or a mysterious figure floated out of the sky to land in the field next door.

Charles Fenwick was a little boy in the Kentish village of Harbledown when Sir Alan Cobham’s troupe of itinerant flyers passed through. His aunt took him to see them.

‘Would you like to go for a flip?’

What a stupendous question! I was on my way to the plane as fast as I could go. I was small for my age and flopped into the rear cockpit. The plane was an early Avro, an aerial marvel quite beautiful to behold. Well, my idea of beauty, all struts and wires and canvas with that intoxicating smell compounded from dope and fuel and hot oil. But to beat it all she was alive. She was roaring like a lion and rattling. I was heading for heaven.⁴

Flying requires courage. Going solo in any aeroplane is alarming. Most aviators never lose a faint feeling of insecurity, no matter how great their experience. Flying with an instructor for the first time in a light aircraft, trainees noted queasily how thin the fuselage seemed, how flimsy the wings, how easy it might be to tip out in a turn. The sensations got more alarming as they progressed to more powerful machines. The Harvard trainer, whose 600-horsepower engine provides only half the thrust of the Merlins of the Hurricanes and Spitfires, is disconcerting enough. Clamping into a tight turn, the most basic manoeuvre of dog-fighting, G forces drag your guts to the sump of your stomach and press your head down on your chest as if you are being crushed by a giant hand. A simple half-roll sends the world spinning incomprehensibly, earth and sky alternating in a blur.

When I experienced this as a passenger, fear never felt far away. It is hard to imagine how pilots were able to fling their aeroplanes around in this way without succumbing to disorientation or panic. It is harder still to understand how they could shoot at, and hit, other aeroplanes while they were doing so. To have the reflexes and eyesight needed to do these things you had to be young. Most pilots were aged between nineteen and twenty-six. They tended to be young in their outlook as well. They liked the latest music, films and fashions and spiced their talk with Americanisms, creating a Hollywood-meets-public-school slang.

The Fighter Boys belonged firmly to contemporary Britain, ideal warriors in what was being shaped as a people’s war. To the public it seemed that their technological skill was, comfortingly, fused to old values and traditions. The pilots’ fathers had fought and died in a war that had traumatized Europe and stimulated a wave of pacifist, and then defeatist, feeling. Yet the sons were accepting their duty willingly, almost cheerfully, and confronting the horror again.

On that August night, as the blackout shutters were fitted into the leaded windows of the White Hart, as last orders were called and the banter and laughter subsided, unwelcome thoughts of tomorrow edged in. The fighting of the day had brought only an interim victory, one that would have to be won over and over again. No one present, airman or civilian, was now in any doubt that they were in the middle of a struggle which would determine whether or not Britain would survive as a free country. Winston Churchill had set the stakes even higher. The battle, he said, would decide the fate of the civilized world. Many elements were involved in determining the outcome. Chief among them was the skill, morale and courage of the Fighter Boys. It was an extraordinary responsibility. Not since classical times had such a tiny band of warriors been asked to bear such a heavy burden. It was the pilots, though, who seemed the least concerned as they finished the dregs from their pewter mugs and stepped out into the cool, hop-scented Kent night.

1 Sportsmen and Butchers

In the summer of 1940 the art of air fighting was only twenty-six years old. In that time, aeroplanes had moved from the extreme periphery to the centre of modern warfare. The invention of aircraft made air wars inevitable. Innovators moved with depressing speed to fit guns to flying machines. The air shows at Hendon, Brooklands and Rheims held before the First World War emphasized the potential destructive power of the thing they were celebrating, with aviators dropping flour bombs on the outlines of warships traced in chalk on the ground. Writers frightened readers with stories of airships bombarding cities, a prophecy whose accuracy was soon to be confirmed.

For the military, though, it was the information-gathering potential of aeroplanes that first attracted interest. The first aircraft were used as observation platforms. In the war game played in September 1912 at the annual British army manoeuvres, Red Force and Blue Force were each equipped with a supporting air component. Early on, two airborne officers from Blue Force spotted a concentration of opposition troops and correctly guessed their direction. The information helped their side to win.

The victorious commander, Lieutenant-General Sir James Grierson, drew an important conclusion from the exercise. ‘So long as hostile aircraft are hovering over one’s troops,’ he wrote, ‘all movements are likely to be seen and reported. Therefore the first step in war will be to get rid of hostile aircraft.’¹

This was how combat in the air was to develop in the four years of the Great War. The essential role of aeroplanes was to lift the roof off the battlefield, allowing commanders to peer into the enemy’s territory, detecting his movements and trying to divine his intentions. At the same time, spotters hovering perilously over the front lines helped to direct the artillery barrages that occupied much of the effort of both sides.

The rival pilots, from the outset, tried to kill each other. One of the first recorded encounters took place on 25 August 1914. Lieutenant C. E. C. Rabagliati of the Royal Flying Corps was cruising with an observer on a reconnaissance mission over northern France when they came across a lone German aeroplane. Rabagliati’s aircraft was unarmed, but he had with him a .303 service rifle. The German carried a Mauser pistol, fitted with a wooden shoulder stock. The two machines approached each other and circled, coming within feet of colliding. Rabagliati fired a hundred rounds without success. Then, he reported afterwards, ‘to my intense joy, I saw the German pilot fall forward on his joystick and the machine tipped up and went down’.²

Such encounters were to be repeated thousands of times in the following years. Technological advances, accelerated by the demands of warfare, meant that the aircraft became faster, more nimble and more sturdy, and the weapons they carried more deadly. But the purpose of aerial fighting remained the same. No bomber heavy enough to make a significant difference on the battlefield or in the rear had emerged by the end of the war. The main function of military flying remained observing the enemy, and trying to prevent the enemy from observing you.

These activities grew to be increasingly important as the war progressed. The RFC went to France with sixty-two aircraft. In April 1918 it became, together with the Navy’s air arm, a service in its own right, the Royal Air Force. It finished the war with 1,799 aeroplanes. This transformation was presided over by a particularly forceful and energetic commander, Hugh Trenchard. There were others who played a crucial part in the creation of a separate air force, but Trenchard’s passion made him stand out. He became known as ‘The Father of the RAF’, a label he claimed to detest. The designation had some truth in it, though. He loved the air force with the fierce love of a father; a Victorian father who would not flinch from sending his boy to his death if duty demanded it.

Trenchard combined nineteenth-century mores with a twentieth-century appreciation of the new. He was born on 3 February 1873 in the West Country, and had a difficult childhood. His sister died of diphtheria, his solicitor father was bankrupted and he failed several attempts to enter military schools before scraping a commission as a second-lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and being posted to India. He spent the first decade of the new century in southern and western Africa. In October 1900 he was shot in the chest while trying to capture Boers and was expected to die. Trenchard, who ‘hated sick people’, pulled through, recovering in characteristic fashion by hurtling down the Cresta run at St Moritz.

He was tall, bony, with mournful eyes that seemed to search for faults and slights. His personality was similarly angular: quarrelsome, morose and dissatisfied, ill at ease in the genial atmosphere of mess and gymkhana club. By 1912 it was clear that his career was going nowhere. He was approaching forty, unmarried and not much loved. His salvation came in a letter from one of his few friends, Captain Eustace Loraine, who was learning to fly at the RFC aviation school on Salisbury Plain. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re missing,’ Loraine wrote excitedly. ‘Come and see men crawling like ants.’³

Trenchard was not a natural pilot. His tall, long-legged frame looked ridiculous crammed into the narrow seats of the primitive Blériots and Farmans that were used to give instruction to trainees. What fascinated him was not flying itself, but its potential. He sensed he had finally made his rendezvous with destiny and joined the RFC. Three years later, in August 1915, he became its commander.

Trenchard tried to make the RFC indispensable, straining to satisfy every demand made on it by the army no matter how unreasonable, or how limited his resources. The aim was to obtain and maintain control of the air over the trenches. The balance of power shifted constantly as the technological and tactical advantage swung back and forth between the sides. The level of fighting was kept high. The RFC’s main business was reconnaissance. Trenchard decided early on that the best way of defending the spotter aircraft and ensuring a steady flow of intelligence to the army was to go on the offensive, reaching over the lines into enemy air space. This was, at best, a logical response to the three-dimensional nature of aerial warfare in which there were no fixed lines to defend and to wait for the enemy to attack was to cede a moral advantage. At times, though, it could seem like an echo of the numb thinking of the terrestrial generals, who, literally stuck in the mud, threw more and more troops into futile attacks because they could think of nothing better to do.

Trenchard did not hesitate to sacrifice men to fulfil the RFC’s obligations to the army and maintain the momentum of aggression. The losses among pilots during the great offensives of 1916 and 1917 came close, in proportionate terms, to matching those on the ground. During the Battle of the Somme pilots were in the air for five or six hours a day. The gaps were often filled by novices coming straight from flying school. Cecil Lewis, eighteen years old, was asked by a senior officer when he arrived at No. 1 Aircraft Depot at St Omer how many hours’ flying experience he had.

‘Fourteen hours.’

‘Fourteen! It’s absolutely disgraceful to send pilots overseas with so little flying. You don’t stand a chance…Another fifty hours and you might be quite decent; but fourteen! My God, it’s murder.’⁴

The aeroplanes which carried the war to the Germans became known as fighters. The machines were constantly being refined and improved. These efforts produced steady rather than startling increases in performance. The Bristol Scout, in service in 1915, had a top speed of 86.5 m.p.h. at 10,000 feet, to which level it could climb in twenty-one minutes. The Sopwith Camel, one of the most ubiquitous types in the closing stages of the war, could in ten minutes reach 10,000 feet, where it could travel at 112 m.p.h. Aircraft armaments similarly became heavier and more accurate as interrupter devices were refined to allow bullets to pass through the arc of the propeller.

Fighter pilots came to exemplify the character and spirit of the new air force, even though their role was essentially secondary. They were a godsend to propagandists charged with conjuring romance out of the horror of mechanized warfare. They operated in the clean medium of the air, detached from the vileness of the trenches. The nature of their work made it inevitable that they would be linked to an older, nobler fighting tradition. Some aviators believed this themselves, at least at the beginning. ‘To be alone,’ wrote Cecil Lewis, fresh from flying school, ‘to have your life in your own hands, to use your own skill, single-handed against the enemy. It was like the lists in the Middle Ages, the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat, the only sphere where there was still chivalry and honour.’⁵

What was true was that to be a successful fighter pilot required different qualities from those that made a good infantry officer. In the air you were on your own. The business was entirely new. There was no one to teach it, no textbooks to refer to. To survive, the pilot had to make his own decisions and develop his own tactics. The new air service attracted men who were independent-minded, adventurous, often unusual, sometimes to the point of eccentricity. Among the first to emerge on the British side was Albert Ball, in whom the values of the playing field jostled unhappily with the neurosis of the battlefield. Ball was brought up in a middle-class home in Nottingham where his father hauled himself up the class ladder, starting his working life as a plumber and ending up mayor of the city. He was educated at a local fee-paying school, founded to promote Anglican principles and a sense of patriotic duty. There were cold baths, perpetual exercise and an emphasis on technology.

Like tens of thousands of other young men, he joined up as soon as he was able, and was posted to the infantry. Frustrated at the delay in being sent to the front he took private flying lessons to improve his chances of entering the RFC. Ball fell instantly in love with flying, despite the hazards. ‘It is rotten to see the smashes,’ he wrote in one of his frequent letters home. ‘Yesterday a ripping boy had a smash and when we got up to him he was nearly dead. He had a two-inch piece of wood right through his head and died this morning.’ He added, without apparent irony, that he would be ‘pleased to take you up any time you wish’, if his parents felt like a flip.⁶

He arrived in France, now a lieutenant in the RFC, in time for the great Somme offensive. He flew a French Nieuport, one of the new generation of single-seater scouts. His methods marked him out immediately. He would fly straight into packs of enemy aircraft, getting in as close as he could, firing off a Lewis gun at point-blank range, breaking off an inconclusive attack only to change the ammunition drum and bore in again. It was simple, effective and desperately dangerous. He would return from sorties with his machine shredded by enemy fire.

On the ground his behaviour struck his fellow officers as odd. At his first base, Savy Aubigny aerodrome, north-west of Arras, he turned down a billet in the village, preferring first a tent, then a wooden hut he built for himself at the edge of the airfield, two miles from the squadron mess. He sent home for packets of seeds to plant marrows, lettuce, carrots, cress and flowers. He spent hours in the hangars, chatting with the riggers and fitters, making constant adjustments to his aeroplane to improve its capabilities, yet he seemed less interested in flying for its own sake than as a means of fighting. The camaraderie of the mess held little interest for him. Nor did women.

His main relaxation was the violin, which he would play after dinner while walking around a red magnesium flare. Another fellow pilot, Roderic Hill, described him sitting outside his hut, playing his gramophone and brooding. ‘He had but one idea: that was to kill as many Huns as possible, and he gave effect to it with a swiftness and certainty that seemed to most of us uncanny. He nearly always went out alone; in fact he would not let anyone fly with him, and was intolerant of proffered assistance.’⁷

For all his oddness, he was respected. A young New Zealander pilot, Keith Caldwell, saw him as ‘a hero…and he looked the part too; young, alert, ruddy complexion, dark hair and eyes. He was supposed to be a “loner”, but we found him to be friendly…One felt that it could only be a matter of time before he “bought it”, as he was shot about so often.’⁸

Looking now at the photographs of Ball, at the thick, glossy hair and the black eyes set in the taut, uncreased skin, one senses fatalism behind the easy smile. Almost from the beginning the mild bragging in the letters home is matched by disgust at what duty had led him into. By the end of August he was yearning for home. ‘I do so want to leave all this beastly killing for a time,’ he sighed in a letter.⁹ Yet even when complaining of nerves he would still take every possible opportunity to get airborne.

In October his superiors ordered him back to England for a rest and a new posting as an instructor. He was already famous, the most successful pilot in the RFC, with an MC, DSO and bar. The prime minister, Lloyd George, invited him to breakfast. He went to Buckingham Palace, where King George V presented him with his medals.

Despite the peace and the nearness to family that he had yearned for when in France, he was restless and unhappy and soon agitating to go back. The pressure worked. In February he was posted to 56 Squadron, which was being formed as an élite unit to fly the new SE5 fighters against the best of the German air force. While waiting he fell in love, with an eighteen-year-old florist called Flora Young, who an old friend had brought with him when he drove over to visit him at the base. The attraction was instantaneous. He offered to take her up in an aeroplane and she gamely accepted. That night he was writing to thank her for ‘the topping day I have had with you. I am simply full of joy to have met you.’¹⁰ On 7 April 1917 the squadron left England. Ball’s tour was supposed to be for a month only. He sent daily letters to Flora detailing his successes and setting himself a target. Once he had overtaken the German champion Oswald Boelcke, he would come home.

At 5.30 p.m. on Monday, 7 May, he lead a squadron of SE5s on an offensive sweep aimed at seeking out enemy fighters, believed to be led by the German ace Manfred von Richthofen, who were operating in the Arras area.

Cecil Lewis described the chocolate-coloured fighters flying into a ‘May evening…heavy with threatening masses of cumulus cloud, majestic skyscrapes, solid-looking as snow mountains, fraught with caves and valleys, rifts and ravines’.¹¹ Suddenly, high over the Cambrai-Douai road, out of these clouds came the Albatross D111 scouts they were looking for. Richthofen was not among the pilots, but his brother Lothar was. The formations rounded on each other in a confused mêlée of individual combats. Lewis described how Ball ‘flew straight into the white face of an enormous cloud. I followed. But when I came out the other side, he was nowhere to be seen.’ Four German officers on the ground heard aircraft engines and looked up to see Ball’s machine slip out from low cloud upside down with its propeller stopped and trailing black smoke. It disappeared behind a stand of trees and crashed into a shoulder of farmland. By the time the officers reached the wreckage a young Frenchwoman had pulled the pilot clear. There were no marks on the fresh features, but Ball was dead.

Lothar von Richthofen claimed the victory, though no one on the British side believed him. The most likely explanation was that Ball became disoriented inside the cloud – a common hazard – and emerged to find he was flying upside down too low and too late to correct the error.

‘The mess was very quiet that night,’ Lewis wrote. They held a singsong in a nearby barn to try and raise morale. The squadron band played and the men sang the hits of the time: ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’, ‘Way Down upon the Swanee River’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Then Lewis sang the Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Requiem’.

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

A month after Ball’s death the London Gazette announced the award of a posthumous VC, noting that ‘in all Captain Ball has destroyed forty-three German aeroplanes and one balloon and has always displayed most exceptional courage, determination and skill’.

A new hero was already emerging from the ranks of the RFC by the time of Ball’s demise, a man of very different background and character. Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock had been in France for just over five weeks when Ball crashed. He knew all about him. Ball’s exploits, read about in the newspapers, had been one of the reasons he had applied to transfer to the RFC from the Royal Engineers. By the time he arrived at the main depot in St Omer he was already twenty-seven, oldish to be a pilot. He had reached the air force by an erratic route. He was born on 21 May 1889 to Irish parents. His father had been a non-commissioned officer in the Second Inniskilling Dragoons, who drank, beat his wife and disappeared, leaving her with two sons and two daughters who she brought up in poverty in Canterbury. Mannock left school at fourteen to work as a clerk. His hard early life converted him to socialism and throughout his military career he enjoyed alarming conventional comrades with his views about class and privilege. He was also an Irish nationalist.

When the war came he was working as a labour supervisor in Turkey with a cable-laying company. He was interned until the Red Cross intervened, returned to England and, with his technical background, ended up in the Royal Engineers with an ambition to be a tunnelling officer. But the training bored him and he was irritated by his fellow officers and their talk of cricket, girls and dances. No one was sorry when he applied for the RFC and went off to learn to fly, managing to bluff his way through the medical despite being blind in one eye from a childhood illness.

By the summer of 1917 the brief period of air superiority the RFC had enjoyed during the Somme offensive, when it had been operating with greater numbers of aircraft and using better tactics, was over. Once again the Germans had taken the technological lead with a new breed of Albatros aircraft grouped into Jagdgeschwaders tasked with achieving control of the sky in whichever sectors commanders selected. Richthofen lead Jagdgeschwader 1. The leading pilots painted their machines in glaring colours – blood red for Richthofen – and decorated them with ancient symbols and devices, including the swastika, which had yet to lose its innocence. Some advertised their identity in huge letters on the top wing. One had inscribed underneath his name, Kennscht mi noch? – ‘Don’t you remember me?’

On 7 June Mannock was helping to escort a bombing mission over Lille when ‘we met Huns. My man gave me an easy mark. I was only ten yards away from him so I couldn’t miss! A beautifully coloured insect he was – red, blue, green and yellow. I let him have sixty rounds at that range, so there wasn’t much left of him. I saw him go spinning and slipping down from fourteen thousand. Rough luck but it’s war and they’re Huns.’ On 19 August he ran into one of the leading German pilots, Leutnant von Bartrap, a holder of the Iron Cross. ‘He came over for one of our balloons…and I cut him off going back…The scrap took place at two thousand feet up, well within view of the whole front. And the cheers! It took me five minutes to get him to go down and I had to shoot him before he would land. I was very pleased that I did not kill him.’¹²

On other occasions he was less considerate. Caldwell remembered watching Mannock chasing a German two-seater trying to reach the safety of its own lines. ‘The Hun crashed but not badly, and most people would have been content with this – but not Mick Mannock. He dived half a dozen times at the machine, spraying bullets at the pilot and observer, who were still showing signs of life…On being questioned as to his wild behaviour after we had landed, he heatedly replied, “the swines are better dead – no prisoners for me!”’¹³

Mannock was full of such contradictions, mixing vindictiveness with bouts of remorse. He seemed to genuinely enjoy air fighting, writing about it unabashedly as ‘fun’ and ‘sport’ in the manner of the day. But he also worried constantly that he was going to crack up. Towards the end he became convinced his death would be a fiery one. It was a common sight to see an aeroplane plunging earthwards, trailing an oily wake of smoke. Fifty-five of eighty machines shot down by Richthofen were registered as gebrannt (burned). On most aircraft the fuel tank was fitted in the nose, close to the engine. In the event of fire the backwash from the propeller blew the flames into the pilot seated behind. Once an aircraft was alight there was no escape. Efficient parachutes existed but pilots were not allowed to have them. The staff view was that possession of a parachute might weaken a pilot’s nerve when in difficulties so that he abandoned his valuable aeroplane before he had to. Anyway, one general reasoned, aeroplanes went down so swiftly there was really no time to jump.¹⁴

Mannock carried a revolver in the cockpit ‘to finish myself as soon as I see the first sign of flames’.¹⁵ The sight of his victims catching fire upset him – ‘a horrible sight and made me feel sick’, he confided to his diary after shooting down a BFW biplane on 5 September. But he referred to the victory in the mess as ‘my first flamerino’.¹⁶ ‘Flamerinoes’ became an obsession. One day after shooting down his fourth German in twenty-four hours he arrived back in high spirits. ‘He bounced into the mess shouting: “All tickets please! Please pass right down the car. Flamerinoes – four! Sizzle-sizzle wonk!”’¹⁷ It seemed to be a case of making light of that which he most feared. In London on leave in June 1918 he fell sick with influenza and spent several days in bed in the RFC club, unable to sleep because of the nightmares of burning aircraft that swamped in every time he closed his eyes. He visited friends in Northamptonshire. When he talked about his experiences he subsided into tears and said he wanted to die.

He returned to France as commander of 85 Squadron. On the evening of July 25 he bumped into a friend from 74 Squadron, Lieutenant Ira Jones, who asked him how he was feeling. ‘I don’t feel I shall last much longer, Taffy old lad,’ he replied. ‘If I’m killed I shall be in good company. You watch yourself. Don’t go following any Huns too low or you’ll join the sizzle brigade with me.’¹⁸

The following day he set off at dawn with a novice pilot, Lieutenant Donald Inglis, who had yet to shoot anything down, to show him how it was done. They ran into a two-seater over the German lines. Mannock began shooting, apparently killing the observer, and left the coup de grâce for his pupil, who set it on fire. Instead of climbing away as his own rules demanded, Mannock turned back over the burning aircraft, flying at only 200 feet. Inglis ‘saw a flame come out of the right hand side of his machine after which he apparently went down out of control. I went into a spiral down to fifty feet and saw the machine go straight into the ground and burn.’¹⁹

Mannock’s self-prophecy had been fulfilled. The bullets that brought him down appear to have come from the ground, a danger he had constantly warned against. He was credited with destroying seventy-four German aircraft by the time he died, nearly reaching the eighty victims recorded by his German opposite number, Richthofen.

Where Mannock and Ball manifested in their own separate ways certain facets of Britishness, Manfred von Richthofen was, to the point of caricature, a paradigm of Prussian maleness. He explained himself with jovial arrogance in an autobiography, The Red Air Fighter, which appeared in 1917. The von Richthofens were aristocrats, though not particularly martial ones. Manfred joined the 1st Regiment of Uhlans after cadet school and was twenty-two when the war broke out. Stationed on a quiet sector of the Western Front, he got bored and applied to join the flying service. After a mere fortnight’s training he was sent to Russia, flying as an observer. By March 1916 he had qualified as a pilot and began operating over Verdun before being transferred back to Russia, where, he confessed, ‘It gave me tremendous pleasure bombing those fellows from above’.²⁰

Richthofen impressed Boelcke, who was on a visit to the Eastern Front looking for candidates for the new Jasta fighter units, and brought him back to the West. On 17 September 1916 he claimed his first English victim, flying in ‘a large machine painted in dark colours. Apparently he was no beginner, for he knew exactly that his last hour had arrived at the moment I got at the back of him.’ Richthofen was ‘animated by a single thought: “the man in front of me must come down whatever happens”.

At last a favourable moment arrived. My opponent had apparently lost sight of me. Instead of twisting and turning he flew straight along. In a fraction of a second I was at his back with my excellent machine. I gave a short burst with my machine-gun. I had gone so close that I was afraid I might dash into the Englishman. Suddenly I nearly yelled with joy, for the propeller of the enemy machine had stopped turning. Hurrah! I had shot his engine to pieces.’

He had also mortally wounded the two occupants. Richthofen ‘honoured the fallen enemy by placing a stone on his beautiful grave’.²¹

So Richthofen’s memoir continues, like the reminiscences of some grotesque big-game hunter, constantly noting his score, always on the lookout for opportunities to increase the bag. He was a ‘sportsman’ by nature rather than a ‘butcher’. ‘When I have shot down an Englishman, my hunting passion is satisfied for a quarter of an hour,’ he wrote. ‘Therefore I do not succeed in shooting two Englishmen in succession. If one of them comes down I have the feeling of complete satisfaction. Only much later have I overcome my instinct and have become a butcher.’

As a sportsman he was keen on trophies and the mess of his ‘Flying Circus’ was hung with the debris of his victims’ aircraft. It was a habit he shared with Mannock, another inveterate crash-site scavenger. In keeping with the hunter’s philosophy, he admired his prey and had strong ideas about what quarry was worthy of him. Between the ‘French tricksters’ and ‘those daring fellows, the English’, he preferred the English, though he believed that frequently what the latter took to be bravery ‘can only be described as stupidity’. Richthofen, of course, subscribed to the courtly view of air fighting – ‘the last vestige of knightly individual combat’. But he was sensible about how it should be practised. ‘The great thing in air fighting is that the decisive factor does not lie in trick flying but solely in the personal ability and energy of the aviator. A flying man may be able to loop and do all the tricks imaginable and yet he may not succeed in shooting down a single enemy. In my opinion, the aggressive spirit is everything.’²² It was an observation that was to prove equally valid when the two sides met again in the air twenty-three years later.

Richthofen’s caution meant that in a long fighting career he sustained only one injury before the end. It came on 21 April 1918 when his red Fokker triplane crashed into a beet field at Vaux-sur-Somme. As with Mannock and Ball, the exact circumstances of his death are confused. The credit for it was contested. Captain Roy Brown of 209 Squadron plausibly claimed to have been shooting at Richthofen when he went in. So, too, did an Australian machine-gun battery in the vicinity. The body was removed from the wreckage and taken to Poulainville airfield fifteen kilometres away. Richthofen was laid out in a hangar on a strip of corrugated metal, staring upwards, in unconscious imitation of the effigy of a medieval knight. In the night soldiers and airmen came in and rifled his pockets for souvenirs.

The notion of ‘aces’ placed Richthofen, Mannock, Ball and perhaps a dozen others at the pinnacle of their weird profession. Beneath them were thousands of other aviators who, though mostly anonymous, none the less regarded themselves as special. The faces that look back from the old RFC photographs are bold and open. The men have modern looks and modern smiles. Unlike the army types, whose stilted sepia portraits require an effort of imagination to bring to life, you can visualize the flesh and blood. The images pulse with confidence.

Unorthodox, even louche, though the pilots seemed to the military establishment, the ethos of the RFC was public school. Cecil Lewis, on applying to join, was interviewed by a staff officer, Lord Hugh Cecil.

‘So you were at Oundle?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Under the great Sanderson?’

‘Er – yes, sir.’

‘Play any games?’

‘Yes, sir. I got my school colours at fives, and I captained the house on the river.’

‘Fives, you say? You should have a good eye, then.’

After a brief discussion as to whether his six foot three inches would be a major handicap, Lewis was in.²³

But there were plenty of pilots who knew nothing of the school close or the college eight. James McCudden, one of the RFC’s greatest pilots, started his career as a boy bugler in the Royal Engineers before transferring to the RFC as a mechanic. Once inside, though, class was always waiting to pounce. John Grider, an American serving with 85 Squadron, recounted how his fellow pilots objected to having McCudden as their commanding officer, ‘because he was once a Tommy and his father was a sergeant-major in the old army. I couldn’t see that that was anything against him but the English have great ideas of caste.’²⁴ The technical ability that flying demanded meant that the RFC could not afford to be exclusive, even though some of the attitudes struck by the pilots seemed in the spirit of a cavalry regiment of another, more raffish time.

The airmen liked alcohol and women, though there were notable exceptions. Ball was teetotal, and had no girlfriend until his meeting with Flora. Mannock drank little and seems to have shown a courtly restraint towards females. Like Ball, he was planning marriage before his death, to a Sister Flanagan who was nursing in France. For Lewis and many like him, though, the bar and the brothel provided fun and relief after the appalling strain. Their playful attitude was summed up in a 1915 drinking song, describing the finale to a day in which the squadron has only narrowly escaped a mauling by an Albatros Jasta.

But safely at the ‘drome once more, we feel quite gay and bright.

We’ll take a car to Amiens and have dinner there tonight.

We’ll swank along the boulevards and meet the girls of France.

To hell with the Army Medical! We’ll take our ruddy chance!

In the cafés of Amiens there seemed to be a large supply of young women happy to entertain Allied pilots who were undeterred by the risk of a dose of clap. Then, as later, wings on a tunic exercised a strong attraction, as Lewis discovered (describing the incident rather coyly in the third person) when he removed his greatcoat after returning with an eighteen-year-old to her room and its vast black iron-and-brass bed.

‘Ah! Tu es pilote! Que j’aime les pilotes!’

‘Yes?’

‘Yais! Yais!’ she imitated, deftly catching a handful of his hair and tugging at it. ‘Tue es beau, tu sais.’ She was on his knee again, and under her open blouse the hollow of her young shoulder seemed infinite in its promise.²⁵

Squadrons would lay on spectacular ‘drunks’ at which the participants sucked on a sponge soaked in a cocktail of whisky and champagne, mixed in a bucket. It was drinking to forget. Insouciance was obligatory. Each death in Mannock’s diary is recorded in the same carefully offhand way – ‘poor old Shaw went West’, ‘We’ve lost poor old Davis’, etc. Trenchard had a policy of ‘no empty chairs at breakfast’ to discourage brooding, replacing pilots instantly, often with greenhorns who were themselves propelled straight to death. During the bad times, the mess at nightfall could be a very melancholy place.

In such an atmosphere you grew fatalistic, and as time went by and left you unscathed, like a batsman who has played himself in, you began to take liberties with the bowling, [Lewis wrote]. You took unnecessary risks, you volunteered for dangerous jobs, you provoked enemy aircraft to attack you. You were invulnerable: nothing could touch you. Then, when one of the old hands, as seemingly invulnerable as yourself, went West, you suddenly got cold feet. It wasn’t possible to be sure – even of yourself. At this stage it required most courage to go on – a sort of plodding fatalism, a determination, a cold-blooded effort of will. And always alone! No friends right and left, no crowd morale.²⁶

Crack-ups were routine. Pilots got to recognize the signs in each other and were sympathetic. Mannock, who was hard on anyone he suspected of hanging back, was kindly towards those he saw were reaching the end of their tether, and in contrast to the trenches a certain humanity seems to have guided posting policy so the bad cases were sent to less arduous duties.

Whatever their personal dreads, the pilots were always grateful they were not on the ground. They looked down at the ‘poor little maggoty men’ toiling in the churned and polluted earth below and blessed their luck. From time to time, they saw the lines at close quarters and the reality was sickeningly brought home. The 20th of July 1917 was a bad day for Mannock. Having shot down a two-seater, he went to inspect the wreckage and discovered a ‘little black and tan terrier – dead – in the observer’s seat. I felt exactly like a murderer. The journey to the trenches was rather nauseating – dead men’s legs sticking through the sides with putties and boots still on – bits of bones and skulls with the hair peeling off, and tons of equipment and clothing lying about. This sort of thing, together with the strong graveyard stench and the dead and mangled body of the pilot (an NCO), combined to upset me for a few days.’²⁷

By the last two years of the war, whatever faint notions of nobility and romance may have clung to the business of air fighting had faded. The headlong style of Ball had given way to cold stalking tactics. The general slowness of the aircraft and the narrowness of the speed margins meant that the attacker approached gradually, leaving plenty of time to reflect on what he was doing as he overhauled his prey.

The most successful pilots spent hours synchronizing their guns and sights. McCudden would seek out the sluggish two-seaters on reconnaissance and, taking great care not to be seen, approach slowly to attack from the blind spot behind the enemy plane, finishing the job with a single carefully aimed burst. ‘My system was always to attack the Hun at his disadvantage if possible,’ he wrote before his death in a crash.²⁸

Mannock dinned into his pilots a basic rule of survival: always above; seldom on the same level; never underneath. The huge tactical advantage of invisibility, gained by having the sun at your back, was quickly understood by both sides, but all light conditions carried their advantages and disadvantages. Allied pilots would lurk in the dusk falling in the east to catch Germans on their way home.

Richthofen, despite his fantasies of knightly combat, made sure he had every advantage possible when he went out to deliver death, protected by his fellow pilots when the odds were in the German favour, allowing him to attack without fear of ambush and breaking off if he felt his opponent was getting the upper hand.

It was all a long way from Rabagliati’s gentlemanly airborne duel in August 1914. Yet when the end came the survivors felt a sort of regret at the passing of what they already saw as aerial warfare’s heroic era. Cecil Lewis was in a village near Ypres when the news of the Armistice came through. ‘So it was over. I confess to a feeling of anticlimax…when you have been living a certain kind of life for four years, living as part of a single-minded and united effort, its sudden cessation leaves your roots in the air, baffled and, for the moment, disgruntled. But the readjustment was rapid and soon we began to explore the possibilities of peace. Where should we go? What should we do?’²⁹

2 Fighters versus Bombers

The possession of an air force the size of the RAF was an affront to the peacetime mood of economy and war-weariness. Under Trenchard it had grown huge. By the end of the war it had 30,122 officers, 263,410 men and 188 combat squadrons.¹ Shortly after the Armistice a decision was taken to prune back the service to a modest force of thirty-three squadrons. The Northcliffe press and air-power enthusiasts in Parliament denounced the myopia of the policy and warned that German quiescence was only temporary. But hardship, public disgust with war and a belief in Britain’s ability to rise to the occasion in a future crisis ensured, until the rise of Hitler forced a change of mind, that a frugal attitude to air spending was maintained. In August 1925, the belief that there was no war on the horizon became official policy with the Cabinet’s adoption of the ‘ten-year rule’, which stated that, in revising defence estimates, it should be assumed that the Empire would not be involved in a major conflict for a decade.

Trenchard was put in charge of supervising the new incarnation. He was philosophical about the new restraints. In his brisk memorandum setting out the post-war organization of the RAF he compared the force to ‘the prophet Jonah’s gourd. The necessities of war created it in a night, but the economies of peace have to a large extent caused it to wither in a day, and we are now faced with the necessity of replacing it with a plant of deeper root.’²

The RAF needed roots if it was to resist the grasping hands of the army and navy, who were once again eager now that the war was over to snatch back control of air assets so they could apply them to their own particular needs. They maintained this covetous attitude throughout the inter-war period. Trenchard fought a canny and tenacious defensive campaign. As Chief of the Air Staff, he limited himself to providing ‘the vital essentials of a skeleton force while giving way on every possible detail on which he felt expense could be spared’.³ He reined in his obstreperous nature and tried to make the best use of the tiny resources available. He needed institutions that would provide the foundations of the new force and establish it as an independent reality, and to arrange the limited manpower at his disposal in the most efficient and flexible way.

In this delicate job he had the backing of Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, who had, predictably, been enthusiastic about flying since its inception, even trying to qualify as a pilot and almost killing himself in the process. None the less Churchill’s support could be fickle and his resolve slacken when faced with the opposition of strong vested interests.

In a paper written for Churchill, Trenchard concluded that the future could be approached in two ways. The first was ‘to use the air simply as a means of conveyance, captained by chauffeurs, weighted by the navy and army personnel, to carry out reconnaissance for the navy or army, drop bombs at places specified by them…or observe for their artillery’. The other choice was ‘to really make an air service which will encourage and develop airmanship, or better still, the air spirit, like the naval spirit, and to make it a force that will profoundly alter the strategy of the future’.⁴

He argued his case for the latter in front of the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the Cabinet, who accepted, with some financial restraints, his and Churchill’s main points. The proposals were set out in a 7,000-word White Paper. The document stated that ‘the principle to be kept in mind in forming the framework of the Air Service is that in the future the main portion of it will consist of an Independent Force, together with Service personnel required in carrying out Aeronautical Research’. With that established, the RAF was saved from assimilation by its hungry older rivals, though Trenchard threw them a scrap by allowing that smaller units within it would be specially trained for cooperation work with the army and navy and would probably be absorbed into their organizations in future.

Starved of money, he planned a small versatile service. Twenty squadrons were to be deployed overseas, ready to react rapidly to local unrest. Four squadrons would be held at home in reserve. All the rest of the RAF’s resources would be concentrated on training officers and men to provide a pool of expertise which could be drawn on when a crisis arose. New training establishments would have to be set up. Trenchard had rejected the suggestion of the generals and admirals that the RAF should use existing army and navy facilities. The ‘air spirit’ could only be fostered in places the RAF could call its own.

To solve the problem posed by the youthful nature of military flying, which meant there were many junior officers and comparatively few senior ranks, he proposed a novel system. Only half the officers at any time would hold permanent commissions. Of the rest, 40 per cent would be short-service officers, serving for four or six years with another four on the reserve. The other 10 per cent would be on secondment from the army and navy.

The permanent officers were to be supplied mainly by an RAF cadet college, the air force equivalent of Sandhurst or Dartmouth, and also from the universities and the ranks. Once commissioned, they would be posted to a squadron. After five years they were required to adopt a specialization, such as navigation, engineering or wireless.

The new air force needed a steady supply of first-class mechanics, riggers and fitters. Most of the thousands of skilled tradesmen who had manned the workshops and hangars on the Western Front and at home bases during the war had returned to civilian life. Trenchard’s Jesuitical solution was to recruit ‘boys and train them ourselves’. They would serve three-year apprenticeships before joining the ranks. There were also plans for a staff college, at Andover, to train future commanders, and centres for research into aircraft development, armaments, wireless and aerial photography.

Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, was chosen for the cadet college. Halton Park, in Hertfordshire, was selected for the main apprentice school. Cranwell was flat, windy and had a large existing airfield. Trenchard liked the fact that it was a long way from London. He hoped that, ‘marooned in the wilderness, cut off from pastimes they could not organize for themselves, they would find life cheaper, healthier and more wholesome’. This, he reckoned, would give them ‘less cause to envy their contemporaries at Sandhurst or Dartmouth and acquire any kind of inferiority complex’.⁵

Halton, on the other hand, was chosen for the apprentices – ‘Trenchard brats’, as they became known – because of its proximity to the Smoke. Homesick adolescents would be in easier reach of their metropolitan parents and there were dance halls and cinemas nearby to keep them entertained when the working day was over.

Cranwell is scoured in the winter by freezing winds that race in from the Wash, sunny in the summer. It had been a training base for the Royal Naval Air Service. With the amalgamation of the RNAS and the RFC it had passed into RAF ownership. It opened as the Royal Air Force College in February 1920, the first military air academy in the world. The entrance examination was essentially the same as that for the Sandhurst and Woolwich army cadet colleges, testing applicants on a broad range of subjects, including English, history, languages ancient and modern and sciences – though you could be selected without tackling a science paper.

In the bleak late winter it was a dispiriting place. The first fifty-two cadets arrived, one of them wrote afterwards, to a ‘scene of grey corrugated iron and large open spaces whose immensity seemed limitless in the sea of damp fog which surrounded the camp’.⁶ The new boys lived in single-storey wood and iron huts, scattered on either side of the Sleaford road, linked by covered walkways to keep off the rain and snow. It was not until 1929 that money was available to start work on the main college building, which was specially designed to look old and respectable.

Despite its ramshackle origins, the college was confident from the beginning that it would be great. Writing in the first issue of the college magazine in September 1920, Churchill set the tone.

Nothing that has ever happened in the world before has offered to man such an opportunity for individual personal prowess as the air fighting of the Great War. Fiction has never portrayed such extraordinary combats, such hairbreadth escapes, such an absolute superiority to risk, such dazzling personal triumphs…It is to rival, and no doubt to excel these feats of your forerunners in the Service that you are now training yourselves and I, for one, look forward with confidence to the day when you who are not at the College will make the name of the Royal Air Force feared and respected throughout the world.⁷

The RAF thought hard about the sort of boy it was looking for. In 1919 a committee chaired by Lord Hugh Cecil, the staff officer who had waved Cecil Lewis into the RFC on the basis of his fives prowess, was set up to try and define the educational and human qualities needed for the officer corps. The architects of the new service accepted, in theory at least, that it should be open to all talents. It had been clear since the end of the previous century that social exclusivity was ultimately incompatible with the technological competence modern warfare required. The first senior military figure to understand this was Admiral Fisher, who insisted all his officers had a degree of technical understanding, a move that challenged the class structure of the Navy.⁸

The Cecil Committee decided that all officers must be able to fly, though the qualification was not so rigid as to exclude good technicians who were poor aviators. It wanted boys who exhibited ‘the quality of a gentleman’. It was careful, though, to emphasize that by this they meant ‘not a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’.⁹ Even so, the new cadet college must have seemed to any ambitious lower-class boy and his parents as cold and daunting as the old ones. Air Ministry officials set out to recruit people like themselves. They wrote to public-school headmasters, advertising the benefits of a service career and claiming that flying training was not the hair-raising activity it had been in the war years (though this was far from the truth and accidents at the college were frequent).¹⁰ An Old Etonian officer was dispatched to the Alma Mater to act as a liaison officer.

Unlike the public schools, few state schools had the resources to provide coaching for the entrance exam. Fees were prohibitive. Parents were expected to pay up to £75 a year plus £35 before entry and £30 at the start of the second year towards uniform and books; this at a time when a bank manager earned £500 a year. Despite the Cecil Committee’s wish that selection should be ‘free of the suspicion of partiality in favour of either individuals or classes’, most cadets in the interwar years were public schoolboys.

The curriculum at the beginning was a mix of academic and practical subjects interspersed with drill and PT. In the first year there was little flying, though much time was spent in the workshops and hangars. Cadets lived five to a hut until their fourth, senior, term, when they got their own cubicles. They received £2 15s. (£2.75) a week and each day was packed with activities from reveille at 6.45 a.m. to dinner in the mess. Sports were a fetish, particularly rugby, which Trenchard considered ‘the best game for making an officer and a gentleman out of any material’.¹¹ Keenness on boxing was admired. The life was clean, spartan, boisterous. Women were nowhere to be seen, except at the end-of-course dance, and the limited delights of Sleaford, the local town, were out of bounds. Cadets were allowed motorcycles but not cars and the lanes round about buzzed with souped-up Broughs and Rudges.

Fun was bruising. First-termers were forced to sing a song for the other cadets. Failure to perform well earned a punishment called ‘creeping to Jesus’. The victim was stripped almost naked, blindfolded and forced to sniff his way along a pepper trail that ended at an open window, where he was tipped outside and drenched in cold water.¹² The first commandant, Air Commodore C. A. H. Longcroft, was a hunting man and cadets were encouraged to ride to hounds, though a shortage of mounts meant beagling was more practical. The college had its own pack.

Intellectual activity was limited. There was encouragement from an early teacher, S. P. B. Mais, who left Tonbridge School to become Professor of English at Cranwell. He felt cadets should be treated as undergraduates and founded a play-reading circle and a debating society. The response was initially hesitant. The cadets had gone to Cranwell to fly. Yet at the outset, at the end of their two-year courses, this was something they were still not fully qualified to do. A shortage of aircraft and the demands of the curriculum meant graduates left without their wings, or even a high standard of airmanship. One cadet spent less than nine hours in an aeroplane in his first year, and then only as a passenger. The Avro trainers were equipped with a compass and a bubble indicator like a spirit level to show whether they were flying straight. Navigation was primitive and many flights consisted of simple hops to neighbouring airfields. Cranwell cadets were awarded their wings after leaving once they had satisfied their first squadron commanders that they could indeed fly.

But Cranwell succeeded from the start in generating an air force spirit. The cadets knew what was wanted. Aerial warfare, they understood, had created the need for a hybrid warrior who combined mastery of the latest technology with the mental bearing of a classical champion. It was a new military caste and Cranwell was its spiritual home.

The same aspiration to excellence was encouraged at Halton. Five thousand applicants responded when the scheme was announced. They were mostly boys from the lower middle and upper working classes who saw the RAF as a means of advancement and a gateway to the intoxicating world of aviation. The entrance exam tested applicants on mathematics, experimental science and English. To pass, boys were essentially expected to be up to school certificate level, a tough examination taken at sixteen that qualified the successful candidate for higher education. It was also the entry requirement for Cranwell. Many of those who sat for entrance to Halton and its sister technical schools therefore, had parents who were sufficiently comfortably off to keep them on past the normal school-leaving age of fourteen. Or sufficiently self-sacrificing. In January 1921 a photographer was present as 300 new recruits set off from a London terminus to begin their course. The boys are cheering. Many wear shabby suits and flat prole hats that make them seem miniature versions of their fathers. The caption notes that ‘the variety of class of boys was very striking, many of them having quite an imposing kit, whilst not the least pleased with the whole proceedings were those whose belongings were kept within bounds in brown paper parcels’.¹³

The high standard at entry meant that many of the mechanics servicing the aeroplanes would be educationally equal, and superior in mechanical skill, to the men flying them.¹⁴ RAF other ranks showed less deference to their officers than was customary in the army, where most privates and NCOs came from the uneducated working class. In the RAF, the path from the Naafi to the officers’ mess was wider and more frequently trodden than in any of the other services, and many a rigger and fitter ended up a pilot. The system was constructed to allow, if not exactly encourage, the process. The best three apprentices each year were offered a cadetship at Cranwell, with the expectation, frequently fulfilled, that this would lead to the highest reaches of the service. A new class of airman pilots was announced in late 1921 that offered flying training to outstanding candidates from the ranks. They served for five years before returning to their own trade, but kept their sergeant’s stripes gained by being in the air. The policy meant that by the time the war started about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs – a tough, skilful difficult-to-impress élite within an élite.¹⁵

There were 300 places in the first intake. The regime followed the same hardworking lines as at the cadet college, with classes and workshop sessions from Monday to Friday and Wednesday afternoons off for games. Discipline was milder than in the army or navy, but firm none the less. Only over-eighteens were allowed to smoke, and then when off-base. Trenchard was as proud of Halton as he was of Cranwell. He was aware that by engineering a new class of educated other ranks, the first in British military history, he was doing something radical, almost revolutionary.

Cranwell and Halton formed the human nucleus for the new air force, but the manpower they provided fell far short of requirements. The short-service commission scheme helped reduce the deficit. It started in 1924 when the Air Ministry advertised for 400 young officers for flying duties. It wanted British-born men of pure European descent¹⁶ who would serve up to six years and spend four more on the reserve list. Despite the lack of long-term career security, there were many takers. The universities seemed another promising recruiting ground. The idea started with RFC veterans, who went up to Cambridge after the war to study engineering, and was encouraged by Trenchard during a visit in 1925. It spread to Oxford, and later to London.

Trenchard had raised the notion of a territorial air force of weekend fliers in his 1919 proposals. Churchill rejected it. It won the backing of the subsequent air minister Sir Samuel Hoare. A bill to set up an Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) was brought in by the short-lived Labour-led government which came to power in January 1924. The first four squadrons were formed in October 1925: No. 600 (City of London), No. 601 (County of London), No. 602 (City of Glasgow) and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh). The pilots were amateurs who flew in their own time on aeroplanes supplied and maintained by the RAF, and the units were intended to have a strong local character. Trenchard considered they would be a success ‘if it was looked upon as as much of an honour to belong to one…as it is to belong to a good club or a good university’.¹⁷

This suggested a degree of social exclusivity. There was a strong snobbish tinge to some of the first formations. Flying had always been fashionable and rich amateur airmen were numerous. The Auxiliary Air Force provided an opportunity for some of them to band together in a patriotic cause, with friends from club, links and office. No. 601 Squadron was, according to its own legend, founded in White’s, the grandest address in Clubland, on the initiative of the son of the first duke of Westminster. Lord Edward Grosvenor, after Eton and a spell in the French Foreign Legion, had served as a pilot in the RNAS in the First World War. Like several forward-looking grandees he believed air power would decide future conflicts. Auxiliary squadrons, he felt, would allow men to go to war surrounded by comrades with whom they shared ties of place and friendship. Seriousness of purpose was overlaid with thick layers of upper-class fun. He recruited from his own circle. The squadron historian noted that he ‘chose his officers from among gentlemen of sufficient presence not to be overawed by him, and sufficient means not to be excluded from his favourite pastimes – eating, drinking and White’s’.¹⁸ Candidates were invited to his home in Eaton Square and sluiced large glasses of port. If they passed muster it was on to the club bar for gin and tonics. The squadron’s town headquarters were at 54 Kensington Park Road, in Notting Hill. They were furnished and equipped to cavalry regiment standards with silver, military prints on the walls, costly vintages and rich food. The gatherings echoed to the sound of broken glass. After dinner it was customary for diners to try and circumnavigate the room without touching the floor. Another game involved persuading some visiting dupe to ‘calibrate the table’. One of the company would lie on his back with his legs hanging over the edge of a large oval table while other squadron members tilted it back and made a show of measuring the angle between wood and limb. Then it was the victim’s turn. Once he was helpless, his ankles were grabbed, the table was tipped back and tankards of beer poured down his trouser legs.

Members held an annual training camp at Port Lympne on the Kent coast. It was the summer home of their patron, Sir Philip Sassoon, who combined a wild enthusiasm for flying with almost total ineptitude as a pilot. Squadron pride was nourished by manufactured rivalries with other Auxiliary Air Force units, japes designed to annoy the regular RAF, and self-conscious displays of individualism such as the wearing of bright red socks with uniform.

The snobbery was in keeping with the times and provoked indulgent smiles. But this was not what Trenchard had had in mind. At Cambridge he had emphasized that in the AAF and university squadrons, there was room for everyone: ‘the man of initiative and the man of action, the methodical man and even the crank. We open our ranks widely to all.’

Despite the gilded image, not all the auxiliary pilots were rich. Applicants to the AAF needed to be able to fly solo and hold an A licence and courses cost £100. It was a considerable investment. The Air Ministry recognized the reality, refunding tuition costs once a trainee had qualified. Altogether there were to be twenty-one auxiliary squadrons drawn from all over the country. From 1934 they were equipped with fighters instead of bombers. When the war came they made up a quarter of Fighter Command’s front-line strength.

Trenchard retired at the end of 1929. His energy and advocacy had ensured the survival and growth of the RAF, albeit slowly and painfully. The RAF was undernourished. From 1921 to 1930 the annual expenditure estimates hovered between £19 million and £18 million. In 1923 the government had promised to build a metropolitan air force of fifty-two squadrons for home defence. Six years later, there were only twenty-five home-based regular squadrons in service, augmented by eleven auxiliary and reserve units, and no official hurry to make up the shortfall.

But the service had an existence and an identity. It had a sky-blue ensign, adorned with one of the red, white and blue roundels the First World War pilots had had painted on their aircraft to shield them from ‘friendly fire’. It had its own slate-blue uniform and forage cap. It had a good motto – Per Ardua ad Astra. A system of squadron organization, evolved in the battlefields of France, had been established and an independent rank structure, painfully worked out in face of mockery from the army chiefs, that climbed from aircraftman to Marshal of the Royal Air Force. There was an apprentice school to ensure a steady flow of skilled technicians to maintain the aeroplanes and a cadet school and a short-service commission scheme to provide pilots and commanders.

Great energy and thought had gone into the work of creating the new service, comparatively little on defining its purpose. The RAF had men, machines, organization and identity. What it did not have as yet was a clear idea of its purpose. A post-war Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor once wrote that ‘before 1939 we really knew nothing about air warfare’. It was a frank admission, but Slessor was in a position to know. Twenty years earlier, in May 1937, he had been promoted to the post of deputy director of plans at the Air Ministry and was appalled to discover how unfitted the RAF was to defend Britain.¹⁹

The state of the air force during most of the inter-war period was a reflection of a general unwillingness, found in every corner of society, to contemplate another bloodbath. Preparing for war seemed more likely to encourage than prevent it. There were clear political, economic and psychological reasons for Britain’s reluctance to rearm. The aversion to doing so was reinforced by confusion as to what weapons were required. Everyone agreed that air power would be crucial. No one knew exactly why or how. If there was a consensus it centred on the belief that bombers and bombing would play a predominant role. Something of the effects of aerial bombardment was already known, from the British and German experiences in the First World War and from small wars that had flared up around the world subsequently. Many military and political analysts believed that hostilities would begin in the air and the results, particularly for civilians, would be horrible.

German Zeppelin airships, then Gotha and Giant bombers, had provided a glimpse of what could be expected, from their intermittent and haphazard bombing campaign on British cities and coastal towns that began in January 1915. Altogether, in 103 raids they killed 1,413 people, all but 296 of them civilians. They wounded between 3,400 and 3,900, the vast majority of them non-combatants.

What impressed was not the quantity of the violence but the quality. In one raid carried out in daylight on 13 June 1917, fourteen Gothas, each loaded with a 500-kilogram bomb, reached the centre of London. One bomb struck a school in Poplar, killing 18 children and maiming 27. Zeppelins excited particular terror. Their destruction provoked un-British displays of glee, with crowds clapping, singing and cheering in the streets as the airships sank to earth with their sixty-strong crews roasting in the flames.

Henceforth, civilians could expect to be in the front line and neither military nor political thinking placed much faith in their ability to endure the experience. As the overture wars of the 1930s established the themes of the great symphony of violence to come, it appeared more and more certain that civilian morale would be unable to withstand the coming ordeal. As early as 1925, the Air Staff were predicting casualties of 1,700 dead and 3,300 injured in London alone in the first twenty-four hours of hostilities, resulting in ‘the moral [original italics] collapse of the personnel employed in the working of the vital public services’.²⁰ The Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1932, the German Condor Legion’s destruction of Guernica in April 1937, the Italian bombardment of Barcelona, all reinforced notions of aerial warfare’s crucial, possibly decisive, importance.

There were two obvious approaches to countering the danger. One was to improve Britain’s defences to a point where the enemy – always Germany, apart from a brief, fantastical moment in 1922 when France was identified as the threat – would be deterred from launching an attack or would suffer severely if it did. Proponents of this view believed that the war had shown that fighters mustered to defend British airspace were, after a slow start, competent to handle raiding airships and bombers. At the same time, the experience had accelerated the development of effective anti-aircraft gunnery and searchlights. The second approach was to concentrate on building up a strong offensive bomber force. That, too, would have a deterrent effect. But if deterrence failed, it left Britain with the means of striking back.

It was the second view that took hold, both in air force and political thinking, although never to the point where alternative reasoning was suppressed. The strategic debate of the inter-war years was dominated by two phrases. They were slogans rather than expressions of profound thought. One was the idea of the ‘knock-out blow’, which could bring victory in a single action. The other was the conviction that ‘the bomber will always get through’ – a phrase popularized by Baldwin in November 1932 in a Commons speech which sent a spasm of foreboding through the country. What that meant, he continued brutally, was that ‘the only defence is offence…you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’.²¹

The logic of this bleak conviction was that fighters would have only a secondary role to play. Despite the prevalence of these views, successive governments proved reluctant to invest in building up a bombing force that could both ‘get through’ and strike the ‘knock-out blow’. Money was one problem. But the understandable miserliness of politicians trying to manage a vulnerable economy in shaky times was informed by less easily identifiable and more complex motives. Many of the public figures of the 1920s and 1930s had served in the war and knew its horrors at first hand. They shared the ordinary citizen’s dread of a recurrence, and shrank away from consideration of the unpopular positions that a reasoned rearmament policy would have required.

The conduct of Britain’s defence in the years from 1918 to 1936 looks now to have been extraordinarily negligent and foolhardy. It seemed so to some at the time. But among the victor nations the impulse was to seek idealistic alternatives, exemplified by the great disarmament conference of 1932-4 and the foundation of the League of Nations. Until the threat from Germany was naked and unmistakable, the RAF would lack the sort of carefully planned, sensibly timed and realistically funded programme it needed to develop properly. Progress was jerky and reactive and frequently triggered by panic. The original plan to create fifty-two squadrons for home defence was provoked by alarm at the news that France had an air fleet of 300 bombers and 300 fighters. When that chimerical threat evaporated, so, too, did the will to pursue the scheme.

The arrival of Hitler in 1933, and Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference, produced another spurt of activity, resulting in what was known as expansion scheme A. It was officially announced in July 1934, the first of thirteen such schemes that appeared over the next four years, most of which never got beyond the proposal stage, as Britain tried to achieve some sort of rough parity with Germany. Scheme A was an interim measure designed to signal to Hitler that Britain was prepared to take to the starting blocks in an aerial arms race. It also created a structure to provide training, and the basis for a more ambitious expansion should the message be ignored. The planned level of home squadrons was increased from the original fifty-two to sixty-four. Scheme A also increased the proportion of fighter squadrons. There were to be twenty-five now, against thirty-nine bomber units compared to seventeen and thirty-five in the 1923 plan.

The shift was a political rather than an air force initiative. It was opposed by the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Edward Ellington, who stuck to the view that a big bomber fleet was central to Britain’s security. The well-publicized fact that the increased range of German bombers meant they could now reach well into the industrial north-east of Britain and the Midlands undermined this approach.

The argument that there was no real defence against bombers was being invisibly eroded anyway. Out of sight and far away from the committee rooms where military planners and government ministers and officials met, scientists and engineers worked with RAF officers to develop technologies that would greatly increase the vulnerability of attacking air forces. In the search for scientific means of combating attacking aircraft, attention had been given to a ‘death ray’ which would neutralize the ignition systems of aircraft, causing them to drop from the sky. Research under the direction of R. A. Watson-Watt, superintendent of the Radio Department at the National Physics Laboratory, suggested the scheme was impractical. However, the experiments confirmed the fact that aircraft interfered with radio waves and radiated a signal back. This suggested the possibility of a detection system that could reveal their position, height and direction. The huge importance of the discovery was recognized immediately and from February 1935 there was strong official backing for the development of what became known as radar.

The RAF’s own thinking had been that if enemy aircraft were to fly at more than 200 m.p.h. at over 10,000 feet, and no warning was given of their approach before they reached the coast, it would be impossible to get aircraft airborne in time to prevent them from bombing London. Now radar could provide that warning, a development which, as one historian of the RAF observed, ‘indicated the obsolescence of the RAF’s whole existing theory of war’.²² None the less the belief that bombers provided the best security would persist until the end of 1937. The change was led by government figures who were persuaded that there was no longer any hope of equalling the numerical strength of the Luftwaffe before war broke out.

Radar complemented important breakthroughs that were being made in aircraft design. The development of military aviation in Britain had been haphazard. The Air Ministry had no designers of its own and relied on private firms to answer specifications for new types. Perennial money problems made it difficult to establish long-term relationships with private manufacturers, hindering the development of an efficient system of procurement, research and development such as existed in Germany.

There were delays of up to six years between the issue of a specification, acceptance of a design, manufacture and entry into service. The progress of the Hurricane and the Spitfire from drawing board to the skies was quicker, but far from smooth. By the end of the 1920s it was obvious the biplane era was over. The most powerful machine in the RAF’s hands, the Hawker Fury, could only manage 250 m.p.h. The 1929 Schneider Cup, a competition of speed and endurance between seaplanes, was won by the Southampton firm of Supermarine with an S6, a monoplane with a streamlined fuselage and metal wings, flying at an average of 328.63 m.p.h. In 1930 the Air Ministry issued specification F.7/30 for a new high-speed fighter, opening the competition to single wing designs. Monoplanes had been around from almost the beginning of aviation but were inferior in terms of manoeuvrability to biplanes, whose twin surfaces provided considerably more lift. Streamlining, metal airframes and new engines powerful enough to keep them airborne removed this restriction and delivered the future to the monoplane.

In August 1933 Sydney Camm, chief designer at Hawker Aircraft Limited, presented two designs to the Air Ministry for a biplane and a monoplane. Both were rejected as too orthodox – evidence of the presence of some radical and imaginative minds at important decision-making levels inside the air establishment. The board of Hawker decided to continue development anyway. When the Air Ministry issued a new specification the following year, Camm’s design was close to their requirements, and a prototype, K5083, was ordered. The RAF wanted a fighter capable of 300 m.p.h. which could fly as high as 33,000 feet. To meet these demands the aircraft needed to be streamlined with an enclosed cockpit and a retractable undercarriage. It also had to be capable of bearing a battery of machine guns. Ballistics experts calculated that at the new high speeds an intercepting fighter would have only two seconds to shoot down an incoming bomber. Eight machine guns, each firing 1,000 rounds a minute, were needed to provide the required weight of fire.

The novelty of the project and the high demands of the specification meant that fundamental problems of physics, engineering and design arose at every stage. The crucial question of power had been answered by the appearance of the Rolls-Royce PV twelve-piston engine, later known as the Merlin. It developed 1,030 horsepower, more than twice that of the best engine of the First World War. The thrust it delivered made speeds of 330 to 340 m.p.h. possible – more than enough to satisfy the RAF’s demands.

Camm’s original design had been called the Fury monoplane, a name that conceded the fact that even after 4,000 blueprints the aircraft was only half-way evolved from its biplane origins. The frame was of metal tubes and wooden formers and stringers. The skin was fabric, heavily painted with dope to reduce drag, and stressed-metal wings were only added fairly late in the development. The outlines of the old Fury were certainly discernible in its profile. But it was definitely something else. They called it a Hurricane. It was not a new name, having belonged to a short-lived aircraft of the 1920s. But it conveyed a note of confidence and aggression that was infinitely more reassuring than the placid Harts, Flycatchers and Grebes of the previous generation.

The Hurricane made its first flight on 6 November 1935 at Brooklands in Surrey. Hawker’s chief test pilot, George Bulman, a small, bald, ginger-moustached extrovert who had flown with the RFC in the war, was in the cockpit. The prototype had been developed in great secrecy. When the tarpaulins were stripped away and the hangar doors opened, there were murmurs of surprise. It was painted silver, which emphasized the sleekness of its low, humped lines and the sculptured way the rounded wings fitted beautifully flush to the fuselage below the neat, narrow cockpit. It was big, bigger than any existing fighter, and at more than 6,000 pounds very heavy. It seemed unlikely that a single engine could get it off the ground. Bulman, in overalls and flying helmet, approached the machine and vaulted into the cockpit watched by Camm and other Hawker executives, who stood at the edge of the damp field, smoking nervously. The Hurricane bumped away into the distance then turned into the wind. The rumble of the Rolls-Royce engine deepened into a roar. The machine moved forward, gathering speed, but slowly, so that some thought Bulman would not get airborne before he ran out of field. At the last moment the Hurricane left earth in an abrupt bounding movement and climbed steeply. The spectators watched the undercarriage retract and the muscular shape dwindle into the distance until it disappeared and the sound of the engine faded. Half an hour later the reassuring drone was heard again. Bulman performed a perfect three-point landing and taxied over to where Camm was waiting to report the flight had been ‘a piece of cake’.²³

The Spitfire, the first prototype of which flew in March 1936, was a more modern design, all metal with a monocoque fuselage and thin, elliptical wings, the more sophisticated offspring of the Supermarine C6. It had the same Merlin engine as the Hurricane and carried the same guns, but at 5,180 pounds it weighed 1,000 pounds less and went 30 m.p.h. faster. The name was proposed by the chairman of Vickers, Sir Robert McLean, whose company had taken over Supermarine. R. G. Mitchell, whose designs carried the machine through its various evolutions to become the most beautiful and efficient fighter of its era, was not impressed. ‘Just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose,’ he is reported to have said on hearing the decision.²⁴ But in the propaganda film of his life The First of the Few, which appeared in 1942, he is portrayed as devising the name himself: ‘A curious sort of bird…a bird that spits out death and destruction…a Spitfire bird.’

The orders came quickly, with the Air Ministry ordering 600 Hurricanes and 310 Spitfires in the summer of 1936. The accelerated pace reflected alarm that the next war might come sooner than expected. Preparations at every level speeded up as successive intelligence reports, and the Germans’ own boasts, suggested that Britain’s reluctant rearmament programme was insufficient either to deter or defend.

The sense of urgency, and the rapid twists and turns of circumstance, were evident in the brevity of the shelf-lives of the schemes that succeeded Scheme A, as both government and the Air Ministry tinkered with the plan to take account of a situation that always seemed to be changing for the worst. Only one scheme, Scheme F, approved by the cabinet in February 1936, was implemented as planned, coming to fruition in March 1939.

But the expansion was real. From 1935 forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built, most of which were finished by the time war came. Scheme C, which was approved in May 1935, envisaged 123 home squadrons as opposed to the 76 designated in Scheme A. That meant recruiting 1,500 pilots in the next two years. Altogether the RAF was to increase fivefold between 1934, when there were 31,000 officers and men, and the outbreak of war, when the service had an actual strength of 118,000 backed by about 45,000 reserves.

The Air Minister, Lord Swinton, inherited Trenchard’s system of short-service officers, who since the early 1920s had supplemented and outnumbered the cadre of permanent RAF officers. He intensified links with public schools, attracting 1,700 entrants. A further 800 pilots were found among RAF non-commissioned officers. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all asked to contribute men. The number of auxiliary squadrons increased from eight to twenty in the run-up to the war. But more radical measures were needed to satisfy the new demand and, equally important, to provide a reserve.

A pool of pilots would be essential to replace the dead and wounded once the fighting started. The Director of Training at the Air Ministry, Air Commodore A. W. Tedder, a Trenchard protégé who had inherited some of his briskness of thinking, conceived the idea of a ‘Citizen Air Force’. It was to be democratic in character, and linked to a locality, but to the factories, offices and avenues and crescents of semi-detached homes in the new estates springing up around towns rather than to the shires to which the army’s territorial units attached themselves. The Air Ministry added that the new force should be ‘open…to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’. Given its nature it was felt ‘inappropriate to grade the members on entry in as officers or airmen according to their social class’. Everyone therefore started out the same, as airmen under training, with commissions being awarded later on ability and leadership qualities.²⁵ The Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, as it was christened, started in August 1936. It gave young men of between eighteen and twenty-five the chance to learn to fly, at no cost, in their spare time. They received £25 per annum and were expected to attend an annual fifteen-day flying course at one of the training centres set up around the country. The aim had been to take on 800 a year over three years, but the potential number of recruits was much greater and by the spring of 1939 there were 2,500 RAFVR pilots in training. When war broke out, 310 had already entered Fighter Command.

The second half of the 1930s saw the RAF transformed from a small, professional élite into a mass force with the potential to fight a major war. The question of how it would go about doing that was not finally resolved until the end of 1938, when the great strategic conundrum of bombers or fighters, offence or defence, was settled, at least for the first stage of the coming war. In December that year the balance shifted decisively in favour of fighters and ‘close defence’. The change was initiated not by the air force itself but by the government. Despite radar and the advent of the Hurricane and Spitfire, the Air Ministry pressed for parity with the German bomber force. But the government decided this was no longer possible within the time available. The goal had always been unrealistic. Britain was a democracy, reacting wearily to the threat of a war it had no wish to fight. Rearmament had been late and grudgingly paid for, with the aircraft factories still operating at peacetime levels of production. Germany was a dictatorship, heading at full speed and with no concern for cost towards a conflict of its own making. Britain was not going to catch up before the war was launched. It was the minister in charge of defence coordination, Sir Thomas Inskip, who forced the air force to accept the change in strategic thinking. In a memo to Swinton of 7 December he stated the new thinking crisply:

I cannot take the view that our Air Force must necessarily correspond in numbers and types of aircraft with the German Air Force. I cannot, therefore, persuade myself that the dictum of the Chief of the Air Staff that we must give the enemy as much as he gives us is a sound principle. I do not think it is the proper measure of our strength. The German Air Force…must be designed to deliver a knock-out blow within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The role of our Air Force is not an early knock-out blow – no one has suggested that we can accomplish that – but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.²⁶

The inference was clear. For the time being at least the emphasis would be on defence and making any German attack on Britain too painful to sustain. Despite the strenuous opposition of the Air Ministry and RAF senior staff, the Cabinet backed Inskip’s view. The next years would belong to the fighters, and those who flew them.

3 ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’

The great RAF expansion gave thousands of young men the chance to realize an ambition that had seemed remote and probably unattainable when they first conceived it. That flying was possible was still a relatively novel idea. For most people in the world the thought that they would ever actually do so themselves was fantastical. The banality of aviation has hardened our imaginations to the fascination it excited in the years between the wars. Once, in Uganda in the 1980s, I was at a remote airstrip when a relief plane took some adolescent boys for a joyride. It was the first time they had been in an aeroplane. When they landed their friends ran out to examine them, as if they expected them to have been physically transformed by the experience.

So it was, or nearly so, in the inter-war years. ‘Ever been up?’ people would ask each other at the air displays that attracted hundreds of thousands in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Those who could say ‘yes’ were admired for their daring, their worldliness, their modernity. The men and women who flew the beautiful treacherous machines were exalted and exotic. In the eyes of many, their courage and skill put them at the apex of human evolution.

Aviators were as popular as film stars. Record-breaking feats of speed, distance and endurance filled the papers. Men were the most avid readers of these stories, young men and boys. Almost every pilot who fought in Fighter Command in 1940 fell for flying early. Their interest flared with the intensity of a great romance. For some, the first magical taste came with a ten-minute flip in the rear cockpit of one of the rickety machines of the flying circuses that hopped around the country, setting up on racecourses or dropping in at resort towns. The most famous was led by Alan Cobham, a breezy entrepreneur who was knighted for pioneering flights across Asia. Billy Drake was sixteen years old, on holiday from his boarding school in Switzerland, when the circus arrived to put on a display close by his father’s golf club near Stroud. It was half a crown to go up. Drake was already intoxicated with aviation, but his parents tried to dissuade him, partly because flying seemed a dead end for a middle-class boy, but also because they feared for his safety. The brief hop over the Gloucestershire fields was enough to set the course of his early life. ‘When I got down,’ he remembered many years later, ‘I knew that this was it.’¹

Pete Brothers watched aeroplanes in the skies around his home in Lancashire, where his family owned a firm supplying chemicals to the food and pharmaceutical industries. In his spare time he made model aeroplanes. His family were wary of his enthusiasm. In 1936, on his sixteenth birthday, he was given flying lessons at the Lancashire Aero Club in the hope that the draughty, dangerous reality of flying would cool his ardour. ‘My father said, “You’ll get bored with it, settle down and come into the family business.” But I didn’t. I went off and joined the air force.’ He took his father flying and he, too, became ‘flat-out keen’.²

Sometimes, unwittingly, parents planted the germ themselves. Dennis David was seven years old and on holiday in Margate when, ‘as a special treat, my mother and I went up in an Avro 504 of the Cornwall Aviation Company. Though I was surprised by the din, this…sowed a seed inside me.’³

Just the sight of an aeroplane could be enough to ignite the passion. James Sanders got up at five one morning, in July 1933, at the villa in Genoa where his wealthy archaeologist father had moved the family, to watch a formation of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes, led by Italo Balbo, the head of the Italian air force, heading west on a propaganda visit to the United States, and felt two certainties. ‘There was going to be a war, there was no question about it, and I was going to be in the air force.’⁴

Throughout the inter-war years, all around the country, many a flat, boring pasture was transformed into an airfield and became an enchanted domain for the surrounding schoolboys. On summer evenings Roland Beamont would cycle from his prep school in Chichester to the RAF station at Tangmere, climb on to his bicycle to see over the hedge and watch 11 Squadron and 43 Squadron taking off and landing in their Hawker Furies. From the age of seven, when he had been taken up by a barnstorming pilot, he had been entranced with flying. Watching the silver-painted biplanes, the sleekest and fastest in the air force, he decided he ‘wanted more than anything else to be on fighters’.⁵ Twelve years later he was in the middle of the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes from the same aerodrome.

First encounters with aeroplanes and airmen sometimes had the quality of a dream. Bob Doe, a shy schoolboy, was walking home after classes to his parents’ cottage in rural Surrey when ‘an RAF biplane fighter…force-landed in a field close to the road. I was able to walk around it, touch it and feel what was to me [the] beginning of the mystery of aviation.’⁶ Thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, near the town of Westport in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, a small, restless boy called Alan Deere had experienced the same revelation. While playing near his father’s farm he heard the note of an engine in the sky, looked up and saw a tiny silver machine. He had heard of aeroplanes but never seen one. ‘The fact that one was now overhead seemed unbelievable. Where did it come from? Who was the pilot? Where was it going to land?’ After the aircraft put down on a beach, he and his friends stood ‘for long hours…and gazed in silent wonder at the aeroplane until eventually our persistence was rewarded by an invitation to look into the cockpit. There within easy reach was the “joystick”…the very sound of the word conjuring up dreams of looping and rolling in the blue heavens.’ As he studied the instruments ‘there gradually grew within me a resolve that one day I would fly a machine like this and perhaps land on this very beach to the envy and delight of my boyhood friends.’⁷

Almost all of these recorded episodes feel like encounters with fate. Brian Kingcome was making his languid progress through another term at yet another boarding school when, one sunny afternoon, ‘there came the drone of an aero-engine overhead – not a common sound in the mid 1930s – and a small aircraft circled the school a couple of times at roof-top height. The whole school rushed out to watch spellbound as the tiny machine throttled back and, in that lovely, burbling, swooshing silence that follows the throttling back of an old fashioned aero-engine, glided in to land in the park in front of the house.’ The pilot who emerged, nonchalant and romantic in flying helmet and silk scarf, was a young man, four years Kingcome’s senior, whom he had known at one of the several previous schools his mother’s whims had directed him to.

‘Is there a Brian Kingcome here?’ he asked. ‘Have I come to the right place?’

He had, and there was. My stock soared…Basking in the gaze of many envious eyes, I climbed aboard and a moment later found myself for the first time in a world I had never dreamed could exist – a world free from the drag of earth’s umbilical cord, free to climb, swoop and dive, free of boundaries, free of gravity, free of ties, free to do anything except stand still.⁸

Whatever their differences of background, all these boys were children of their time. Their enthusiasms were stoked by what they read in the illustrated papers, aimed at the youth market, that sold in millions. These, just as others would do a generation later, leant heavily on the preceding war for their material, and particularly on the doings of the heroes who had emerged from the RFC. The anonymous editors of the comics of the era, with their almost infallible comprehension of the young male psyche, recognized at once the charge that old-fashioned swashbuckling married to modern technology would carry. The example of the first fighter aces fixed itself in the imaginations of a generation being born just as they had met their deaths. Even at nineteen the thoughts of Geoffrey Page as he left his public school to go up to study engineering at London University ‘were boyishly clear and simple. All I wanted was to be a fighter pilot like my hero, Captain Albert Ball. I knew practically all there was to know about Albert Ball; how he flew, how he fought, how he won his Victoria Cross, how he died. I also thought I knew about war in the air. I imagined it to be Arthurian – about chivalry…death and injury had no part in it.’⁹

Yet the most popular chronicles of the air war were remarkably frank about what was entailed. The deterrent effect appears to have been minimal. Perhaps Fighter Command’s single most effective recruiting sergeant was Captain James Bigglesworth, created by W. E. Johns, who had flown with the RFC in the First World War and whose stories began to appear in Popular Flying magazine in 1932. The first novel, The Camels Are Coming, was published the same year. Biggles seems unattractive now; cold, driven by suppressed anger, a spoilsport and a bit of a bully. He was a devastatingly romantic figure to the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who went on to emulate him a few years later. Johns introduced them to a

slight fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens but [already] an acting flight commander…his deep-set eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines…He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it.

Many of the stories were based on real events, some relating to Mannock, who appears disguised as ‘Mahoney’. Johns made no attempt to hide the grisliness of the business, emphasizing the man-to-man nature of primitive air fighting. In one story he repeats with approval von Richthofen’s maxim that ‘when attacking two-seaters, kill the gunner first’, and goes on to describe his hero doing just that. ‘Pieces flew off the green fuselage, and as he twisted upwards into a half roll Biggles noticed that the enemy gunner was no longer standing up. “That’s one of them!” he thought coolly. “I’ve given them a bit out of their own copy-book.”’¹⁰ In another, Biggles notes an ‘Albatros, wrapped in a sheet of flame…the doomed pilot leaping into space even as he passed’.¹¹

It is not only Germans who die. Getting killed is presented as almost inevitable. An important and enduring message, one the young readers took to heart, was that there was no point dwelling on it. ‘One of the most characteristic features of the Great War,’ Johns wrote in the Foreword to Biggles in France, ‘was the manner in which humour and tragedy so often went hand in hand. At noon a practical joke might set the officers’ mess rocking with mirth. By sunset, or perhaps within the hour, the perpetrator of it would be gone for ever, fallen to an unmarked grave in the shellholes of No Mans Land.’¹²

The Biggles stories are practically documentary in their starkness, as good a guide to the air war over the trenches as the non-fictional memoirs. Their audiences were absorbed and inspired by them. They changed lives. Reading them reinforced Pete Brothers’s decision to seek a short-service commission in the RAF. He found them ‘beautiful stories that enthralled me and excited me and made me want to emulate them’. At the Lancashire Aeroclub before taking up a short-service commission in January 1936, he had been pleased to find his instructor had been a Sopwith Camel pilot in the war.¹³

Cinematic portrayals of the air were equally frank. The most successful was Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone, which came out in 1938. The 59th Squadron is based on a sticky sector of the Western Front. Sixteen men have gone in a fortnight. Replacements arrive, fresh from a few weeks at flying school. Orders to send them up against hardened Germans come by telephone from senior officers, comfortably quartered miles behind the lines. New names are chalked up on the duty blackboard to be wiped off within an hour. Kit-bags are returned home without ever being unpacked. The Daily Express praised the film’s ‘lack of false sentiment or mock heroics’ and called it ‘one of the best and bitterest melodramas about men and planes’. It was a box-office hit and was seen, often several times, by hundreds of the pilots who fought in 1940. No one was put off. It was the glamour, camaraderie and romance of flying that pulled them back to the local fleapits, not the message of waste and futility. By this time every young man in Britain was facing a prospect of early extinction. Dying in the air might be awful, but it was better than dying on the ground.

With the expansion programme, thousands of young men were now being given a choice in how they would fight the next war. Before it began, the RAF recruited annually about 300 pilots and 1,600 airmen. Between 1935 and 1938 the average RAF intake was 4,500 and 40,000 airmen and apprentices. Air Ministry officials appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in the flying magazines and popular newspapers the young men they were looking for might be expected to read. One that appeared on the front page of the Daily Express, adorned by a drawing of three Hurricanes, promised ‘the life is one that will appeal to all men who wish to adopt an interesting and progressive career…leave is on a generous scale…applicants must be physically fit and single but no previous flying experience is necessary’. Pay, in cash and kind, was set at between £340 and £520 a year. A £300 gratuity was payable after four years’ service, or £500 after six years. Age limits were set between seventeen and a half and twenty-eight. The educational qualification was school certificate standards, although ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’.

Pat Hancock, a mechanically minded eighteen-year-old from Croydon, was at Wimbledon Technical College when he saw an advertisement in the Daily Express. ‘The ministry – bless it – was offering commissions to suitable young gentlemen – four years, and at the end if you survived you got a magnificent lump sum of £300, which was really a lot in those days. I pounced on it and sweet talked my father and mother into allowing me to apply.’¹⁴

Parental permission was needed if the applicant was under twenty-one, and many pilots seem to have faced, at first at least, family opposition. Flying was undeniably dangerous. In an era when men chose a profession, trade or occupation and tended to stick with it for the rest of their working life, it offered a very uncertain career. Despite popular enthusiasm, commercial aviation had been slow to expand. Air travel was confined to the rich. RFC pilots who hoped to make their livings flying in peacetime were mostly disappointed. Arguments were needed to overcome the objections. Billy Drake misunderstood the terms and thought the RAF would pay him an annuity of £300, a detail which persuaded his parents to grant their approval.

Geoffrey Page’s distant and authoritarian father summoned him to his London club when he heard of his plans to apply for Cranwell. Flying was the family business. Page’s uncle ran Handley Page, a leading British aircraft manufacturer. Over tea his father told him he had ‘spoken to your uncle at length about your desire to be a pilot and he has advised me strongly against it. Pilots, he tells me, are two a penny. Hundreds are chasing a handful of jobs.’ He refused to pay for the ‘stupidity’ of pursuing an RAF career. Page’s mother pleaded with him not to take up flying. Page rarely saw his father and resented the intervention strongly. Later he decided it had been motivated by concern. His father had lost a younger brother in the war, shot down and killed over the North Sea while serving in the Royal Navy Air Service.¹⁵ Page eventually made his own way into the RAF, via the London University Air Squadron.

The RAF set out to be meritocratic in its search for recruits, and Tedder, as director of training, decided to cast the net wide in the search for the best candidates. The requirement to have reached school certificate level meant boys from poor families who could not afford to keep their children on until sixteen were theoretically excluded. The rules were not always strictly imposed and officials occasionally used their discretion.

Bob Doe’s father was a gardener on the Surrey estate of the editor of the News of the World. Doe left school at fourteen without passing any exams and got a job as an office boy at the paper’s headquarters in Bouverie Street. One lunchtime he walked over to the Air Ministry headquarters in Kingsway and announced he wanted a short-service commission. ‘I was passed from office to office. They were very disapproving when they found I’d passed no exams. Then I found myself in front of this elderly chap with lots of braid on his uniform and he seemed to like me.’¹⁶ When he discovered that Doe had already joined the RAFVR and done seventy-five hours’ flying, any lack of formal education was forgotten. Doe sat the entrance exam, and with some coaching from his Air Ministry sponsor, got through. Doe’s case was exceptional. Most entrants had passed their school certificate and had gone to fee-paying or grammar schools.

One obvious source for the sort of healthy, uncomplicated, modern-minded young men the RAF was seeking was the Empire. Senior officers were sent overseas to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa to supervise selection. The decision to leave home to cross the world at a time when war seemed to be stirring again in Europe was a dramatic one. Yet the populations of the colonies felt strong sentiments of loyalty and respect towards Britain. The RAF appeal offered broader horizons to ambitious and adventurous young airmen as well as touching a sense of obligation. The response was enthusiastic. On catching their first sight of the mother country, many of them wondered whether they had made the right choice. Alan Deere left Auckland in September 1937 aboard the SS Rangitane and arrived at Tilbury docks at the start of an English winter. ‘The cold discomfort of the railway carriage and the flat, treeless acres of southern Essex were depressing reminders of the warmth and sunshine of far-off New Zealand. We stared in amazement at the grim rows of East End houses, pouring their smoke into the clouded atmosphere, and were appalled by the bustle and grime of Liverpool Street Station, so different from the luxurious gateway to the London of our dreams.’¹⁷

Despite the relative elasticity of the RAF approach, the selection process was thorough and demanding. After the written test and a strict medical, candidates were summoned to a board and questioned by a panel of officers. The examiners were looking for some technical knowledge and evidence of keenness. Enthusiasm for sports was usually taken as strong proof of the latter. At first, short-service entrants were sent off immediately to an RAF flying training centre, but the existing facilities could not cope with the wave of new recruits and Tedder decided to pay civilian flying schools to give ab initio instruction.

The new boys learned in two-seaters, Avro Tutors and de Havilland Tiger Moths. A first flight in the flimsy, thrumming trainers left an indelible impression, akin, as some would remember, to their first encounter with sex. Dennis David had his first lesson in a Blackburn B2 at the grandly named London Air Park, near present-day Heathrow. In reality it was a tiny grass field with a clump of trees in the centre, surrounded by houses. Many years later he ‘still [found] it hard to find the words to describe my sheer delight and sense of freedom as the little biplane, seeming to strain every nerve, accelerated across the grass and suddenly became airborne’.¹⁸

Fantasizing about flying aeroplanes was no preparation for the reality. A few, not necessarily the best pilots, found it gratifyingly easy. Johnny Kent, an eighteen-year-old Canadian, had begun learning at the Winnipeg Flying Club, ‘and was absolutely thrilled with the experience of actually handling the controls and I managed to cope with all the manoeuvres including an approach…at the end of this first lesson I knew I could fly’.¹⁹ But many found flight in a small, sensitive aircraft unnerving. Bob Doe was ‘petrified when I first went up. The side of the aeroplane was so thin that when you banked round I was afraid of falling through it. In no way did I have an affinity for it.’²⁰ On Hubert Allen’s first flight as a new candidate for a short-service commission the instructor

put the Tiger Moth into a bunt [loop] and I was sick. He shouldn’t have done that, but perhaps he thought I was over-confident and needed cutting down to size. He was mistaken. I was under-confident so I probably acted the part of extrovert to conceal this. ‘Good God,’ he said, when after landing and turning off the magnetos he peered into my cockpit and noticed that I was covered in vomit. ‘I hope you’re not going to be one of those air-sick fellows…better give the rigger half a crown for cleaning up the mess.’…he strode off to the bar.²¹

Even those who had flown regularly as passengers discovered that the violent manoeuvres essential to military aviation differed dramatically from the pleasant sensations of straight and level flying. Tim Vigors, a sporting young man from a landed Irish family, had been taken flying by his godmother, who was an air enthusiast, and he liked it so much he applied to Cranwell. Starting flying training he felt fearful and nauseous. As the instructor put the aeroplane into a loop, a standard, elementary manoeuvre, a ‘queasy feeling engulfed me…then the whole weight of my body fell on my shoulder harness as we turned upside down in a slow roll…fear of falling out of the cockpit eclipsed all other sensations’.²²

Initial success did not mean that progress would then be steady. Robert Stanford Tuck was a confident young man whose long face, athletic build and pencil moustache made him look like Errol Flynn. He had lead an adventurous life in his teens, escaping the mundane horizons of Catford in south-east London for a career in the merchant navy before being accepted for a short-service commission. Tuck started off well. But he found it difficult to progress beyond basics and develop the instinctive ease of handling, the feel that was essential if one was to become a serious pilot. Tuck’s cocky judgement after his first go at the controls was that flying was easy. So it is, if restricted to the basic manoeuvres of take-off, straight and level flight, shallow turns and landing. But after that the learning ladder is steep. Diving, looping and banking tightly are disorientating. Mistakes lead quickly to panic as the actions required to retrieve the situation are usually counter-instinctive. Tuck found he was the dud of his intake, snatching at the controls, over-correcting and suffering potentially fatal lapses of concentration. He began to fear that something he had come to love would be snatched away from him. It was only when he learned that flying did not require great physical effort that his performance started to improve. The secret lay in relaxation, avoiding sharp movements and settling oneself into the fabric of the machine so as to become part of its nervous system. You had to feel the aeroplane. For the fighter pilots of the First World War, buttocks had been an important sensory tool. Pilots felt they lost something when, in 1927, parachutes, which they were obliged to sit on, became standard equipment.

By the time war broke out the RAF was mass-producing officers. The privately run elementary flying training schools dotted around the country taught a basis in practical flying, with a grounding in navigation and gunnery, that prepared pupils for an advanced course at one of the RAF’s own flying training schools. The idea was that, unlike in the previous war, when half-trained men were expected to learn while on squadron duty, pilots would now arrive at their units ready for operations.

The initial flying was done in biplanes. Pupils underwent twenty-two stages of instruction, starting with ‘air experience’ – the first flip – through to aerobatics during the eight- to twelve-week course. Emphasis was placed on learning to recover from a spin, and there was a compulsory practice every week. It was the only manoeuvre, apart from straightforward flying, that was taught previous to the first solo, which came half-way through the course. Most pupils got off alone after between eight and ten hours in the air. Alan Deere was so impatient to do so he forgot the last words of his instructor to fly for only ten minutes and to attempt only two landings. ‘I was really straining at the leash by the time he had delivered these homilies and, thinking he had finished, banged the throttle open…and so into the air, solo at last. One, two, three landings, around again and again I went, the ten-minute limit completely forgotten in the thrill and excitement of this momentous occasion.’²³

Aerobatics were promoted to give pupils complete confidence in their machines as well as preparing them for the stomach-churning reality of aerial combat. Flying blind, encased in a hood, relying only on the instruments, was also taught. Later this hair-raising method was replaced by means of an earthbound flight simulation trainer, the Link. The cost of elementary training was expensive at £5 per pupil per hour (double for advanced training) and those who showed little aptitude were weeded out early on. Those who finished the course successfully went on to a stint at the RAF Depot at Uxbridge for two weeks of drilling, physical training, familiarization with the limited administrative duties required of young officers and learning the niceties of mess protocol. During the fortnight, tailors arrived to kit out the fledgling officers and provide an opportunity for a laugh. Blond, raffish Paddy Barthropp remembered the response to the inevitable question, as they were measured up for their uniforms, which included mess kit with very tight-fitting trousers. ‘When the cutters asked their customers which side they dressed the reply would come. “Just make them baggy around the kneecaps.”’²⁴ The new officers were given £50 to cover everything, including uniforms, shirts, socks, two pairs of shoes and a cap – not enough if you went to the better outfitters.

Before candidates moved on to the next stage of training, the chief instructor at the elementary flying school made a recommendation as to whether a pupil’s abilities best suited him to fighters or bombers. Flying anything required delicacy. Flying fighters required a particular softness of touch. Horsemen, yachtsmen and pianists, the prevailing wisdom held, made the best fighter pilots. The decision was made on the pilot’s flying ability but also on his temperament. Success depended on a combination of discipline of the sort needed to maintain the flying formations beloved of the pre-war RAF, with the audacity and nerve inherent in the dazzling aerobatics which the service also prized as an indication of worth and quality.

The pilots themselves had a say in their fate. To some, like Dennis David, it seemed the choice was preordained, feeling from the outset that ‘it was inevitable that I was to be a fighter pilot…from the start I was a loner. It was just me and my aeroplane hoping that neither of us would let the other down.’²⁵ Alan Deere felt the same certainty, ‘had always determined to be a fighter pilot’ and pressed his superiors to be posted to fighters.

Fighters were not the automatic choice for all young pilots. The strategic thinking of the previous two decades had its effect on ambitious trainees. Most of Deere’s contemporaries thought bombers offered a better career and he was one of only four to go to a fighter squadron. But for the majority fighters offered a degree of freedom and individuality that was not available in a bomber crew – and, as was clear even before the war began, a greater chance of survival. Brian Kingcome, who after Cranwell was posted to 65 Fighter Squadron, considered that ‘only a man brave beyond belief would ever want to go into bombers. Us cards all went into fighters.’²⁶

After leaving the depot, the half-formed pilots moved on to one of the flying training schools to learn on service aircraft. In the early days of expansion, trainee fighter pilots started out on biplanes like the Hawker Hart or the Audax. These eventually made way for the Miles Master and the North American Harvard. The latter was a twin-seat, single-engined trainer with half the horsepower of the new breed of fighters, but which none the less gave a taste of what it would be like to handle a Hurricane or Spitfire when the time came.

The instruction was testing. Deere lost his temper after his teacher scolded him for his clumsy performance of the highly difficult manoeuvre of spinning a Hart, first one way, then the other, with a hood over his head to blot out vision. The tantrum nearly lost him his commission and he was told he had been given another chance ‘only because the Royal Air Force has already spent so much money on your training’.²⁷ The pilots were taught set-piece attacks against bomber formations, each one numbered according to the circumstances. There was some gunnery practice, a small part of which involved using live ammunition on towed aerial drogues.

The student pilots lived in the mess and dressed for dinner each night in mess kit, dinner jacket or lounge suit, depending on the day of the week. Saturday was dress-down day, when blazer, flannels and a tie were permitted. After successful completion of the first half of the course, pilots received their wings, a brevet sewn over the tunic pocket that announced their achievement to the world. It was a great moment, ‘the most momentous occasion in any young pilot’s career’, Dennis David thought. Al Deere felt a ‘thrill of achievement and pride’ as he stepped forward to receive the badge.

Finally, on completion of training, the new pilots were posted to a squadron. In the first years of expansion, units did their best to preserve what they could of the civilized atmosphere that had prevailed before the shake-up. At Hornchurch, where 65 Squadron was stationed, Brian Kingcome enjoyed ‘a most marvellous life…if I wanted to take off and fly up to a friend of mine who had an airfield or station somewhere a hundred miles away for lunch, I would just go. It went down as flying training. I didn’t have to get permission or [check] flight paths. I just went. If you wanted to go up and do aerobatics, you just went.’²⁸ Hornchurch was a well-appointed station, built, like many of the inter-war bases, in brick to a classically simple Lutyens design. The mess, where everyone except the handful of married officers lived, was separate from the main base across the road and in front of the main gates. It stood in its own grounds, with a large dining room and bedrooms. Kingcome found it ‘luxurious beyond belief…the food was superb; you had your own batman and quarters. There was no bar in those days so you did all your drinking in the anteroom with steward service. The gardens outside the mess were beautifully kept with pristine lawns and flower beds.’ There were also squash and tennis courts and a small croquet lawn. Pilot officers – the lowest commissioned rank – were paid fourteen shillings (70p) a day, from which six shillings (30p) went on the cost of mess living. That covered food, lodging, laundry and a personal batman.

The rest went on drink and cars, which the junior officers clubbed together to buy to visit country pubs and make the occasional trip to London, less than an hour away. The frequency of nights out depended on two considerations: the price of drink and the price of petrol. To initiate a pub crawl, Kingcome and three or four friends would each put half a crown (121/2p) into the kitty. They would then board one of the jalopies (cost £10 to £25) held in loose collective ownership by the squadron. Petrol cost a shilling (5p) a gallon for the best grade, or tenpence (a little over 4p) for standard grade. After having downed several drinks costing eightpence (4p) for a pint of beer or a measure of whisky, they would still have some change over to share out at the end of the evening. Ten shillings (50p) would cover a trip to town, including train fare if no car was available, and the bill at Shepherd’s, a pub in Shepherd’s Market in Mayfair. It was run by a Swiss called Oscar and became one of Fighter Command’s main drinking headquarters in London. For a pound the evening could be rounded off in a nightclub.

Biggin Hill, which like Hornchurch originated as a First World War station, was rebuilt in September 1932 to a similar design. It became home to two fighter units, 23 Squadron and 32 Squadron. Pete Brothers arrived in 1936 to a ‘nice little airfield, a lovely officers’ mess’. The station had a reputation for joie de vivre, and its members enjoyed, when they were not flying, a life of sport, of visits to London and being entertained at surrounding country houses. Because of the airfield’s location, 600 feet above sea-level, unexpected visitors aboard civil airliners often dropped in when Croydon was closed by fog. One day in 1936 an Imperial Airways airliner landed carrying the American Olympic team, including Jesse Owens, fresh from his triumph at the Berlin Games. On another occasion a party of French models arrived after being diverted there on their way to a London fashion show. Churchill, whose home at Chartwell was only a few miles away, arrived unexpectedly one evening early in 1939. ‘We were having a drink in the anteroom when the door opened and in walked Winston,’ Brothers, who by then was a twenty-one-year-old flight commander with 32 Squadron, recalled. ‘We all got up and said, “Good evening, sir, can we get you a drink?” The waiter brought him a dry sherry and he asked if we could turn the radio on so he could hear the news. We listened, then he said, “Are you enjoying your Hawker Spitfires?” We didn’t like to say, “You’ve got it wrong, they’re Hurricanes.”’²⁹

Behind the military briskness there lurked an atmosphere of fun. Jokes were not always in the best taste. In 1936, at the height of the war in Abyssinia, Biggin Hill, like every other station, put on a display for the annual Empire Air Day. To demonstrate bombing techniques a Hawker Tomtit dropped flour bombs on an old car carrying two ‘native’ figures. One, disguised in a black beard, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a pith helmet, was unmistakably supposed to represent Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Abyssinia who had lost his throne after the Italian invasion. The crowd loved it but the Air Ministry was not amused. There was jovial rivalry between the Biggin units. A new squadron, No. 79, was formed around a core of pilots transferred from No. 32 while Peter Brothers was there. ‘There were games. We decided we’d have a contest to see who could do the shortest landing. We had to pack it up when some chap hit the hedge and turned his aircraft over and smashed it up.’

Tangmere, at the foot of the South Downs, was a particularly pleasant post. A dreamy, prelapsarian atmosphere seems to have permeated the place in the last years of peace. Billy Drake, arriving there aged nineteen in the summer of 1937 as a newly commissioned pilot officer, found life was sweet. The summer routine involved rising at six and flying until lunchtime in Hawker Furies. Afternoons were spent swimming or sailing at Bosham and West Itchenor. Then there would be a game of squash or tennis before dinner and bed. Social life centred on the mess, furnished like the lounge of a luxury liner, where Hoskins and Macey, the white-coated stewards, shuttled back and forth with silent efficiency. There were good pubs nearby; like the Old Ship at Bosham, where on a summer evening you could sit with fellow pilots or a girlfriend and watch the sun going down over the estuary. Conversation concerned aeroplanes, cars, sport and parties, rarely politics. What was happening in Abyssinia, Germany or Italy was hardly mentioned. If the drums of war were beating, the pilots affected not to hear them. Drake had barely considered the implications of his decision to apply for a short-service commission. ‘I simply wanted to go flying,’ he said. ‘The fact that it might involve going to war never occurred to me until 1938 or 1939.’³⁰

Life was not so congenial at every fighter base. Conditions around the country were variable. The fast rate of the expansion meant accommodation often lagged behind needs. Desmond Sheen, a nineteen-year-old Australian who joined the RAF on a short-service commission from the Royal Australian Air Force, arrived at 72 Squadron at Church Fenton in Yorkshire in June 1937 to be told he was living in a tent at the end of the airfield while the mess was being built. ‘We stayed there until November when the fog and the mists drove us out and we moved into hangars until the building was completed.’³¹ When Arthur Banham reported for duty to 19 Squadron at Duxford in Cambridgeshire after finishing his training in August 1936, he was put with nine other junior officers in a hut which acted as a dormitory. ‘The whole place was a mess, with trenches all over the place where they were laying foundations for the new buildings. The officers married quarters weren’t built and most officers lived out of the aerodrome altogether.’³²

Arriving at their first posts, the newly qualified pilots learned quickly that henceforth everything would centre on the squadron. It became the focus of their professional and their social lives. Nothing could be more exciting than flying and no one could be more fun to be with than one’s fellow fighter pilots. ‘It was a wonderful time for most of us,’ remembered John Nicholas, who joined 65 Squadron in December 1937. ‘It was very pleasant to be with a number of young men of one’s own age, most of whom believed in the same things.’³³ Some of the pre-expansion pilots had worried that the influx would dilute the clubby character of the old organization and dissolve its tenderly guarded esprit de corps. Peter Townsend, a sensitive, reflective career officer who had passed out of Cranwell as the Prize Cadet, returned to Britain to join 43 Squadron in June 1937 after a posting to the Far Bast, to find that ‘gone were the halcyon days of “the best flying club in the world” Tangmere was now peopled by strange faces, different people with a different style. I resented the new generation of pilots who had answered the RAF’s urgent appeal and found heaven-sent relief from boring civilian jobs.’³⁴ Townsend accepted, almost immediately, that these feelings were unworthy. In a subsequent mea culpa he admitted that ‘my prejudices against them were ignoble, for they were soon to become the most generous-hearted friends, then, a little later, die, most of them, for England’. The reasoning was, anyway, wrong. At any time in the years before the run-up to the expansion programme, a majority of officers in the admittedly much smaller RAF were serving on short-service commissions.

The newcomers took to the existing traditions quickly, offering no serious challenge to the way things were done. Many were familiar with the routines of sport, joviality and boisterous high spirits from school days. Most of the short-service commission pilots entering in the expansion years had a public-school background of one sort or another. Roland Beamont was at Eastbourne College, Geoffrey Page at Dean Close, Cheltenham, Paddy Barthropp went to Ampleforth and Arthur Banham to the Perse School, Cambridge. Bob Tuck attended a small fee-paying day school, St Dunstan’s at Catford, and Pete Brothers a similar establishment, North Manchester School. Billy Drake, James Saunders and John Nicholas were educated abroad. Pat Hancock went to a day school in Croydon before moving to the technical college. Dennis David had been to a boarding school in Deal before changing to Surbiton County School. Of the Cranwellians, Tim Vigors had been at Eton and Brian Kingcome at Bedford.

Most of the entrants, even if they had not been to a proper public school, knew something of the ethos, if only from the pages of the Magnet and the Gem. Bob Doe, a secondary-school boy, felt out of place. Of his fellow short-service entrants he was ‘probably the poorest of the lot. I hadn’t done all the things other people had done. I felt very much an outsider. I was very shy as well, which didn’t help. They were friendly enough but I always felt I was inferior.’³⁵ The barriers were lowered when he was invited to club together with three others to buy a Hispano-Suiza saloon for £20, this enabling them to go on occasional forays into Cheltenham, twelve miles from Little Rissington, where they were based.

The overseas entrants had little difficulty fitting in. Their status as colonials put them beyond the rigid categorizations of the British class system. Desmond Sheen’s father was a plasterer, but he found at 72 Squadron that ‘everyone got on, with a lot of hilarity and a lot of fun, extremely well. There was no conflict. There was a lot of taking the mickey out of each other, but it was all very friendly. They were all good sports.’³⁶

Being a good sport was the essential quality in fitting in. Taken literally, it meant that athletic ability would count in a pilot’s favour, a factor which benefited the outdoorsy arrivals from the Empire. Deere found that ‘the natural reserve of all Englishmen gave way to a more friendly approach’ after a game of rugby in which New Zealanders took on the rest, beating the English pilots by a colossal score. He was a boxer who had taken part in the New Zealand amateur championships. He was reluctant to don the gloves again, but was persuaded to do so by a senior officer who advised him it would be good for his career. The abbreviation of a first name, the bestowal of a nickname, signalled you were in. Alan quickly became Al.

Being a good sport, however, went beyond the observance of the conventions, attitudes and observances of middle-class males of the time. A mood of tolerance prevailed so that individuality, even eccentricity, was prized. The business of aerial warfare meant that the type of military discipline applied to soldiers and sailors was not appropriate for airmen. Junior officers addressed their squadron superiors as ‘sir’ on the initial meeting of the day. After that it was first names. Once in combat in the air, everyone was essentially on their own and beyond the orders of a commander. Good pilots, anyway, succeeded by initiative and making their own decisions.

From the earliest days on the Western Front, pilots took a relaxed view of military conventions and often displayed a sceptical attitude towards senior officers, though seldom with their own immediate commanders if they had earned their respect. Pomposity was ruthlessly punished and shyness discouraged. Coy newcomers learned that a certain amount of leg-pulling and practical joking was the price of belonging. Deere, like all new arrivals, spent his first few weeks at 54 Squadron at Hornchurch doing dogsbody tasks like overseeing the pay and clothing parades. He was also required to check the navigation inventory and found to his concern that an item called the Oxometer was missing. On informing his flight commander, he was told that this was a very serious matter and the station commander might have to be notified if it was not found. It was some days before he ‘realized that no such item of equipment existed and that it was a trick played on all new pilots and one in which everyone from the station commander down participated’.³⁷ The joke took on a further refinement when a particularly earnest pilot officer was told that the missing Oxometer had been found. A fake instrument was rigged up and the relieved officer invited to blow in it to check it was working, which resulted in him being sprayed with soot.

The boisterous and extrovert tone of squadron life disguised a level of consideration and fellow feeling that perhaps marked out the RAF from the other services. The testimony of survivors, and what little was written down by those who died, is imbued with an overwhelming affection for fellow pilots and for the units in which they served. The camaraderie that came with membership of a fighter squadron appears to have provided a degree of spiritual sustenance, augmenting the warmth of an absent family or making those with dislocated backgrounds feel they had arrived at a place where they belonged. The simple cheeriness that was the Fighter Boys’ chosen style masked some complicated stories. Geoffrey Page’s parents were separated. His father frightened him and he resented his miserly attitude toward his mother. Dennis David was brought up by his mother after his father, who drank and had financial troubles, abandoned the family when he was eight. Brian Kingcome’s mother had returned to England with her children, leaving her husband to continue working in India. He returned only once every two and a half years. As Kingcome was at boarding school, he barely saw his son during his childhood and adolescence.

The modern assumption is that such experiences must leave a mark. Feeling sorry for oneself lay outside the range of emotions allowed to adolescents in Britain in the 1930s. Kingcome admired and respected his largely absent father. Paddy Barthropp’s mother died in childbirth, a tragedy that meant his father ‘resented my very existence almost up to the time of his own death in 1953. I never blamed him.’ At Ampleforth one day in 1936 ‘a school bully approached me to say that it would be a good idea if I read page four of The Times in the school library. There it was for all to see – “In the High Court of Bankruptcy, Elton Peter Maxwell D’Arley Barthropp”…the fact that one was skint was not acceptable and carried a long-lasting social stigma…the next few days were the most embarrassing of my life.’ He was farmed out to a step-grandfather, ‘extremely rich and very nasty’, among whose many possessions was the Gresford Colliery near Wrexham. On hearing that there had been a disaster at the mine killing 264 miners, the old man ‘replied that he didn’t want to be disturbed. He disgusted me.’³⁸ Barthropp eventually got an apprenticeship with Rover Cars in Coventry before deciding to join the RAF after a visit to the Hendon Air Display.

Barthropp was hopeless academically. He failed the school certificate five times, and only scraped through his RAF board by gaining ‘a phoney pass’ from a crammer. Roland Beamont also failed his school certificate and had to resort to coaching to get the qualification he needed to be eligible for a short-service commission. Denys Gillam, who joined the RAF on a short-service commission in 1935, had been kicked out of his prep school, then his public school, Wrekin College, for drinking and exam irregularities. He later joined 616 Squadron and commanded two fighter squadrons. Against the wisdom of the pre-war days his preferred pilots were ‘non-athletic men between the ages of eighteen to twenty-three’, who had ‘better resilience to stress than the successful rugger player or his equivalent…all the best pilots that I knew tended to be rather weedy, though there were exceptions. The best pilot were ones that hadn’t had much success in other spheres and were determined to succeed.’ Teaching a course to a class of wing commanders later in his career, he discovered that ‘out of a group of twelve…four had been thrown out of their school before they left. This was, I think, fairly typical.’³⁹ Kingcome was to deliver the opinion later that, ‘Fortunately for us, and, I believe, for the RAF in that generation, there were [no]…psychological and aptitude tests, which would have failed a majority of candidates for short-service and permanent commissions and I suspect might have cost us the Battle of Britain.’⁴⁰

Expansion increased the flow of men from the lower reaches of the RAF into the ranks of the fliers as candidates were selected from among the ground crews to serve as sergeant pilots. Of the 2,500 pilots originally sought to man the new aircraft and squadrons, 800 were found from among those already serving as aircraftmen or non-commissioned officers. The RAF apprentice schemes allowed a trickle of fitters, riggers and other tradesmen to receive flying training, on the understanding that they would return to their trades after five years. There were also two places set aside for the top performers at Halton to go on to Cranwell to take up a cadetship. Many, perhaps most, apprentices had dreams of flying. Realizing them was difficult. There was an obvious necessity to maintain the supply of highly skilled, expensively trained ground staff to keep the service flying and prevent apprenticeships from turning into a back-door route to a career as a pilot. None the less, in the pre-expansion years, some of the keenest and most talented felt themselves baulked by what was supposed to be a system that worked on merit. George Unwin was brought up in South Yorkshire, where his father was a miner. His mother encouraged his education and he won a scholarship to Wath Grammar School, and aged sixteen passed his Northern Universities matriculation exam. There was no money for him to take up a place. The only work on offer was down the pit. When, a month before he was due to leave, his headmaster showed him an RAF recruiting pamphlet, he decided to join up.

Unwin chose the Ruislip administrative apprentice school rather than the technical school at Halton, as the course there was two rather than three years. It was a spartan life. The food was horrible. They seemed to live on gristly mutton rissoles, and food parcels from the outside world were eagerly received. They shaved in cold water and lived twenty to a billet. Unwin initially had no thoughts of flying, but the sights and sounds of the aerodrome kindled his ambition. After passing out in 1931 as a leading aircraftman, the minimum rank to qualify for pilot training, he applied, but discovered that ‘only one per cent per six months was taken’.

He repeated the process twice a year without success. ‘I was getting a bit fed up at not being accepted. I had everything else. I was playing for the RAF at soccer, and that was one of the things you had to be, to be very good at sport. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being selected. You went through a very, very tedious process. First of all you saw your flight commander, then your CO, and then your station commander. If you got past him you saw the air officer commanding. I’d reached the point when I was going to see the AOC and I was getting desperate. At the time it was Air Vice-Marshal J. E. A. Baldwin, who loved polo and kept his own polo ponies.’ Unwin decided that when the inevitable question about hobbies came up at the interview, he would be prepared. ‘I said “horse riding”. He pricked up his ears and said, “Really?” I said, “Of course, I can’t afford it down here, but the local farmer at home has a pony and lets me ride it.” The only time I’d ridden a pony or anything on four legs was in the General Strike when the pit ponies were brought up and put in fields. I was thirteen and we used to catch them and jump on their bare backs and go haring down the field until we fell off.’⁴¹

It worked. He was on the next course. It was 1935, four years after he first applied. In August 1936 he was posted to 19 Squadron at Duxford as a sergeant pilot, where his flight commander was Flight Lieutenant Harry Broadhurst, an ex-army officer who had joined the RAF in 1926 and flew in the campaigns against unruly tribesmen on India’s North-West Frontier. Broadhurst had played a large part in building the squadron’s reputation for flying excellence, which had won it many trophies, and he was regarded as the best shot in the RAF.

Unwin, despite his background, fitted relatively easily into the squadron. His best friend was another ex-apprentice whom he had met on the flying course, Harry Steere, who had gone to Halton from his secondary school in Wallasey in 1930. The two were to fly together for six out of the next seven years. Unwin found that 19 Squadron’s competitive streak was compatible with a relaxed approach to duty. ‘You didn’t fly Saturdays, ever. You could take an aeroplane away for a weekend any time you liked. You used to fly away for lunch. You were encouraged to do this because it helped your map-reading. There were no aids at all, so you [navigated] visually. Radio telephony wouldn’t work more than three miles from the aerodrome and then the background noise was so terrific you couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying.’ On annual exercises at Catterick, Unwin would take his aircraft and buzz his home village of Bolton Upon Dearne.

Making the transition from ground to air was a hit-and-miss affair and required the patronage of an interested senior officer. Ronald Brown left Halton in 1932 to be posted to the RAF station attached to Cranwell, where he worked as a fitter overhauling the engines of the aircraft on which the cadets at the college were taught to fly. Every morning ‘the instructors would have a ten-minute flight to check the aircraft was safe for the cadets, and as they were dual-control aircraft we were able to jump in the back or the front. Inevitably that meant we were allowed to fly the plane with them, and long before I went on a pilot’s course I was looping and rolling aeroplanes to my heart’s delight every morning.’

Brown played football for the RAF and the group captain commanding him was a keen sportsman. ‘I had the opportunity of flying him around once or twice and I think that, plus my sporting activity, gave me the chance of being selected for pilot training.’⁴² Brown was one of only two airmen to be given the opportunity to fly in the three years he spent at the base. Before he could begin his flying training he was, to his disappointment, posted as a fitter to No. 10 Bomber Squadron at Boscombe Down. When he complained to the CO, he was told he could not start the course until the football season was over and the squadron had won the RAF cup. He was sent to 111 Fighter Squadron at Northolt in February 1937.

Sporting prowess got an airman applicant noticed and pushed his name further up the list. George Bennions, from Stoke-on-Trent, arrived at Halton in January 1929. He was a keen boxer and believed that ‘they preferred to recommend sportsmen to become sergeant pilots [as] one way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff because there were many, many people at Halton who could equally have done the job’. Bennions was put forward for a Cranwell cadetship, an offer that later fell through, though he did end up joining 41 Squadron as a sergeant pilot and was commissioned in the spring of 1940. Some of Halton’s most successful products were outstanding athletes. Don Finlay, who left in August 1928, became a world-class hurdler, winning a silver medal for Britain at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He was to take command of 54 Squadron in August 1940, during some of the heaviest fighting of the summer.

As the situation worsened and the demand for pilots grew, the process of transformation became easier. George Johns arrived at Halton in January 1934 as an aircraft apprentice and by the end of 1939 was a sergeant pilot with 229 Squadron. ‘You immediately said to yourself: I’m working with these aeroplanes. I’m going to fly them some time. That was the attitude you found there.’⁴³ Airmen who rose from the ranks to become pilots were to play an enormously important part in the air fighting of 1940. Often they had spent more time in the service than the officers and gained more flying experience. Unlike many of the officers, they also had a deep knowledge of the aircraft they were operating. Pre-war conventions created a certain distance between officer and NCO pilots, but this faded with the intimacy brought by shared danger and death.

Boosting the short-service commission system and intensifying internal recruitment ensured the supply of pilots needed to man the new squadrons. But men were also needed to fill the places of those who would be killed and badly wounded in the initial fighting. The Volunteer Reserve (VR) had been created to fill that gap, though this was not how it was presented to the men who turned up at the centres that sprang up around the country to process applicants. There were many of them. The target figure set in 1936 of 800 a year for three years was reached quickly, and in the spring of 1939 there were 2,500 volunteers under training. By then there were thirty-five flying centres, with eight in and around London and three near Bristol, while Manchester and Birmingham were served by two each.

Tedder had decreed that this should be a ‘Citizen Air Force’, modern and democratic, attracting ‘air-minded’ young men from factory, shop and office, and this was how it turned out. Frank Usmar was a postman’s son from West Mailing in Kent, who left school at fourteen to work in an office and spent his evenings studying accountancy at night school. In 1938 the RAF opened a recruiting office in Rochester. Usmar’s interest in flying had stemmed from seeing Dawn Patrol. He applied, was accepted and thereafter spent two nights a week attending lectures at the VR Hall in Rochester and weekends flying at a local airfield, for which he was paid a shilling an hour. After nine and three quarter hours dual flying on an Avro Tutor, he went solo. The part-time nature of the training meant that it took much longer to get new pilots up to standard, and it was a year before he moved on to service aircraft like the Hart, Hind and Audax.

But the system did identify pilots showing great potential who could be brought to operational level quickly when the time came. Charlton Haw would never have got into the RAF under normal peacetime conditions. He left school at fourteen to become an apprentice in a lithographic works in York, and as soon as he was eighteen applied for the RAFVR. ‘I’d always wanted to fly, from when I was a small boy. I never wanted to do anything else, really, but I just didn’t think there would ever be a chance for me. Until the RAFVR was formed, for a normal schoolboy it was almost impossible.’⁴⁴ Haw went solo in four hours forty minutes, at a time when the average was eight to ten hours, and was considered a natural pilot by his instructor. Not that a slow start necessarily denoted incompetence. There was a school of thought that said that the longer the apprenticeship, the better the pilot.

The reserve offered an escape from dreary jobs in stifling offices. John Beard was working in the Midland Bank at Leamington when a circular arrived saying that employees who joined the VR would be granted an extra week’s holiday to allow them to train. Beard began flying at Ansley aerodrome at weekends and going to lectures in Coventry on navigation, meteorology and elementary engineering and aeronautics a few evenings a week. Ron Berry left school at sixteen and got a job as a clerk at an engineering works in Hull. He stayed eighteen months before moving on to the city treasurer’s department. Early in 1938 he saw an advertisement for the RAFVR in a local paper and realized how ‘keen I was to try something like that’. To prepare for the medical he ran round the local park every morning at seven o’clock. He was interviewed by an impressive squadron leader in a uniform displaying an Air Force Cross. ‘He made me feel strongly about doing something other than clerical work in the city treasurer’s office.’⁴⁵

The RAFVR also gave young men a say in their own fate, a chance to choose which branch of the services they would be absorbed into before the inevitable seeming processes of conscription took the decision for them. In January 1939, Robert Foster was working at Shell headquarters in London. ‘I thought there was going to be a war and I didn’t particularly want to be in the army, or a conscript. I never really thought about the problems of being in the air force, but that seemed a better way to fight a war than as a common soldier.’⁴⁶

The RAF seemed to offer a relatively clean way of fighting the coming war. Many of those who joined had fathers who had served in the First World War and whose experiences had left a strong and disturbing impression. Christopher Foxley-Norris, who was commissioned in the RAFVR after leaving the Oxford University Air Squadron, remembered that undergraduates, when ‘sitting around in the evening having a beer…used to discuss our ability to survive trench warfare. We’d all read All Quiet on the Western Front and those sort of things. My father was gassed at Loos in 1915. He died after the war in 1923, of cancer. I think most of us doubted we could stand it.’⁴⁷

The expansion programme also brought an influx of new pilots – many originating from further up the social scale than the young men flocking to the RAFVR – into the Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) and University air squadrons buttressing Trenchard’s design for the air force. After February 1936 eight new auxiliary units were created and four existing special reserve squadrons were transferred to the AAF. By the beginning of 1939, fourteen squadrons, most of which had started out equipped with bombers, had been redesignated as fighter units, though the aeroplanes for them to fly were often slow in coming. By the time the great air battles began in July 1940, there were twelve auxiliary squadrons operating as day fighters and two as night fighters – a quarter of Fighter Command’s strength.

Among the new creations was 609 (West Riding) Squadron, formed in February 1936. Its first commanding officer was Harald Peake, an old-Etonian businessman from a local coal-owning family who had been chairman of large concerns like Lloyds Bank and London Assurance, and a keen amateur flier who took his private aeroplane on summer tours of the Continent. Peake had long been eager to raise auxiliary squadrons in the county when further units were required, and as soon as he was given the go-ahead began recruiting from among the sons of the big industrial and landowning families of Yorkshire. Stephen Beaumont, a junior partner in his family’s law firm, which had Peake as a client, was one of the first to join. He was a thoughtful and dutiful man with a strong social conscience. With Hitler’s arrival in power he felt a growing conviction that war was inevitable and he decided to fight in it as a pilot. He began flying at the West Riding Aero Club at Yeadon near Leeds, and when he heard that a new squadron was being formed, offered his services to Peake.

Beaumont found Peake ‘very capable. He was about thirty-seven and had held commissions in the Coldstream Guards at the end of the First World War and later in the Yorkshire Dragoons Yeomanry. Perhaps because of our professional relationship I was somewhat in his confidence. He wanted officers who were no more than twenty-five, of public-school and university backgrounds and unmarried.’ Beaumont was twenty-six and engaged to be married but was accepted none the less. Peake could afford to be choosy. By 8 June he had vetted 80 applications for commissions and 200 for posts as airmen. Despite this response, actual recruitment was slow, only speeding up as war approached. The squadron had a sprinkling of officers from aristocratic and county backgrounds. They included Peter Drummond-Hay, a textile executive who insisted on the use of both barrels of his Scottish name. He was discontented with his work in the cloth trade. Beaumont wrote that ‘he liked to give the impression that he would be better employed as the owner of a large country estate, where he would know all the county, and indeed in North Yorkshire he did know a great many of that section of society. Somewhat caustic about and dismissive of most Yorkshiremen, he was very courteous to women.’⁴⁸ Dudley Persse-Joynt was an oil executive from an old Anglo-Irish family, and the first auxiliary adjutant was the Earl of Lincoln, who later became the Duke of Newcastle. But most of the members came from families who had prospered in the reign of Victoria and whose wealth was founded on coal and cloth.

Philip Barran’s family were textile and coalmining magnates from Leeds. Joe Dawson’s father, Sir Benjamin Dawson, was a power in the cloth trade and a baronet. A later recruit, John Dundas, was related to two Yorkshire grandees, the Marquess of Zetland and Viscount Halifax, and was a cousin of Harald Peake. He was academically brilliant, winning scholarships to Stowe and Oxford and taking a first in modern history before going on to study at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. He had joined the staff of the Yorkshire Post, specializing in foreign affairs, and was sent to report from Czechoslovakia at the time of Munich and accompanied Chamberlain and his own kinsman Halifax to Rome. Barran, always known as Pip, was stocky, boisterous, a rugby player, a trainee mining engineer and the manager of a brickworks owned by his mother’s family. His commanding officer eulogized him as ‘the very best type of AAF officer, a born leader who communicated his enthusiasm to others’.⁴⁹ It was he who came up with the nicknames that adorned the members of 609 as they prepared for war.

The last auxiliary squadron to be formed was 616, which officially came into being on 1 November 1938 in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, as an offshoot of 609. Hugh Dundas had left Stowe in the summer of that year and was hoping to follow his brother John to Oxford. His father, however, insisted on him going into the law and he ended up being articled to a firm of Doncaster solicitors. Dundas applied to join 616 Squadron, but mysteriously failed the medical exam three times before finally being passed fit by an ex-Ireland rugby international RAF doctor after ‘the most perfunctory examination’, for which Nelsonian oversight he was eternally thankful.

Dundas finally joined in the last summer before the war. His CO was the Earl of Lincoln, who had moved on from 609, and other squadron members included Teddy St Aubyn, a Lincolnshire landowner who had moved into the AAF after being forced to resign his commission in the Grenadier Guards following his marriage to Nancy Meyrick, daughter of Kate ‘Ma’ Meyrick, who presided over the Forty-Three, a nightclub in between-the-wars London whose liveliness shaded into notoriety.

Dundas spent his time divided between Bawtry, the home of his aunt and her husband Bertie Peake – a lakeside house where the decor and routines had not changed since the 1890s – and the mess at the squadron station at Doncaster, where he also had a room and a batman. It was there that he acquired his nickname. ‘I was sitting by the fireplace in the mess one evening before dinner. On the wall at my side was the bell button. Teddy St Aubyn and others were there. Teddy felt the need for further refreshment and decided that I was conveniently placed to summon the mess steward. “Hey you,” he said pointing at me. “Hey you – Cocky – press the bell.” I promptly did his bidding. But why had he described me as “Cocky”? What had I done? Nervously I asked him.’ St Aubyn replied that he had forgotten his name, but that Dundas, an elongated figure with a shock of hair, reminded him of a ‘bloody great Rhode Island Red’. The name stuck to him for the rest of his life.

He spent the summer days learning to fly in an archaic dual-control Avro Tutor, probably one of the last RAF pilots ever to do so. Some difficult manoeuvres came quite easily, ‘But slow rolls I hated and had great difficulty in achieving. I felt quite helpless when the machine was upside-down and I was hanging on my straps, dust and grit from the bottom of the cockpit falling around me. Again and again, when inverted, I instinctively pulled the stick back, instead of pushing it forward and so fell out of the roll in a tearing dive.’⁵⁰

The search for new pilots also meant an increase in the strength of the university air squadrons. In May 1938 there were three, Oxford, Cambridge and London, which had been set up three years previously. That month they each increased the number of available places from seventy-five to a hundred. It had been hoped that the squadrons would provide a practical link between the air force and aeronautical research, particularly at Cambridge. The Oxford University Air Squadron (OUAS) operations book records its primary object as being ‘to provide at the university a means by which interest in the air generally and in particular in the Royal Air Force can be stimulated’. Its second function was to ‘provide suitable personnel to be trained as officers for the Royal Air Force in the event of war’. In practice, for most of its life the squadron functioned primarily as a flying club, for which the government paid.

Christopher Foxley-Norris went up to Oxford from Winchester in 1936 and was encouraged to join the OUAS by his brother, who was already a member. The prospect of the £25 gratuity paid on being accepted was also attractive. He wanted to buy a car, which he believed to be a crucial accessory if he was ever to get a girlfriend. OUAS members cut a dash. They were chauffered to their station at RAF Abingdon in two old Rolls-Royces, nicknamed Castor and Pollux, hired from a local firm. Once qualified, one was entitled to wear the squadron blazer with crest and gold RAF buttons. Foxley-Norris regarded it as ‘a corps d’élite. It was very difficult to get into because there were some very outstanding people. It was a glamorous sort of club to be in, but not like the Bullingdon or something upmarket like that.’

The most immediately noticeable member was Richard Hillary, whose harsh wit, self-regard, good looks and ability as an oarsman made him stand out in a society not short of distinctive characters or large egos. Foxley-Norris met Hillary through friends who had been with him at Shrewsbury, his old school. ‘I came across him when we were out on pub crawls and that sort of thing and I got to know him quite well. He was extremely arrogant and conceited.’⁵¹ Hillary was also a poor learner, and his progress was not helped by the amount of time he spent on the river. ‘This member proved very difficult to get off solo,’ noted his instructor. ‘He would not relax on the controls, he just held on like a vice.’ Once flying alone, however, he ‘improved rapidly’. The chief flying instructor judged that he ‘lacked keenness…I do not consider that he has any real interest in flying’.⁵²

Hillary was to have a powerful effect on British and international perceptions of the character and motivations of the pilots of 1940 through his book The Last Enemy, which appeared in 1941 after he had been shot down and badly burned, and became a best-seller in Britain and the United States. It is a book as much about friendship as flying, and those closest to him in the last years of his short life were all products of the University Air Squadrons. Among them was Noel Agazarian, the third son of an Armenian father and a French mother who had bought an old Sopwith Pup biplane and parked it in the garden of the family’s Georgian house in Carshalton, Surrey, for the boys to clamber over. Agazarian went from his public school, Dulwich, to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1935, leaving three years later with a boxing blue and a law degree. He joined the air squadron and was commissioned into the RAFVR in January 1939. He was a brilliant linguist, funny and disrespectful. He was also good looking and when it came to attracting women was a match for Hillary, who seems to have rather resented his easy and natural charm. ‘We called him Le Roi Soleil,’ said his adoring young sister, Yvonne. ‘He was always laughing and clowning. Noel was very much loved by everyone who met him.’⁵³ Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney, both old Etonians, had also joined the Cambridge University Air Squadron and both had been commissioned in the RAFVR by the end of 1938. They met Hillary during training and their subsequent intense and poetic triangular relationship was to be celebrated in the book.

The great variety of backgrounds and schools, the wide divergences of rank, wealth and privilege, made Fighter Command perhaps the most socially diverse élite ever seen in the British military. In a country where minutely defined social gradations conditioned the reactions of human beings to each other, the mingling of the classes caused some discomfort. The situation was described in a condescending bon mot: ‘Auxiliaries are gentlemen trying to be officers. Regulars are officers trying to be gentlemen. VRs are neither trying to be both.’ It was a last, snobbish gasp from a disappearing world. Very soon the distinction would not matter. It was true that many of the men in Fighter Command came from backgrounds that were ‘ordinary’. But that did not mean that they themselves were so; and they were about to do extraordinary things.

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