Dogfight Read online

  ...we were able to visit clubs and theatres, see our girlfriends and make merry. Up to that time the rationing was hardly felt by anyone, good food was still plentiful, so were beers and wines. The atmosphere of all our parties was ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’. The pressure of living was rather high and many a party went through to the dawn.[4]

  Overall though, compared ‘with the massive carnage of the First World War there seemed to be something wrong’, Olive observed. ‘It was once said that war is a time of prolonged boredom punctuated by periods of intense fear. We were certainly having our share of boredom.’ As uninspired as some pilots were, the phoney war was a blessing in disguise as it afforded the New Zealanders and Australians the opportunity to become better acquainted with the aircraft that would become synonymous with the Battle of Britain.

  Aircraft

  The Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire arrived along with the Anzacs in response to the rise of Hitler. In 1934, a year after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the British Air Ministry set its sights on machines more powerful than had previously graced England’s skies. It issued specifications demanding a monoplane with a speed exceeding 300 mph and capable of flying at an altitude in excess of 33,000 feet. This called for an aircraft with slippery aerodynamics, retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit. In terms of armament, the Air Ministry calculated that given the speed of these new machines, any given attack would last only a couple of seconds. Therefore, in order to maximise the possibility of shooting down the enemy in these fleeting moments, the usual two guns would be boosted to a staggering eight machine-guns, each delivering 1000 rounds a minute.[5]

  The first response to these specifications was the Hurricane. Kinder found the Hawker machine far faster and more lethal than its biplane predecessors. In good measure this was due to the installation of the Second World War’s finest aviation engine: the Rolls-Royce twelve-piston Merlin. Delivering 1030 horsepower, it was twice as powerful as any power-plant of the Great War.[6] ‘Hurricanes were my favourites ... as they were so stable in rough weather or behind a jerry aircraft pumping lead into him,’ concluded Kinder.[7] The Hurricane’s well-known ease of maintenance and a supercharger modification in March 1940 made up for the slightly older construction methods that included the use of fabric covering.

  Like the Hurricane, the Spitfire was a Merlin-powered monoplane. However, in two important areas it differed from the former. First, the airframe, following trends in France and Germany, was all metal, with the aircraft’s skin supporting the structural load. Second, the distinctive thin wings set it apart from the bulkier Hurricane appendages. Elliptical wings offered the possibility of reducing drag and thereby enhancing the aircraft’s performance. This design feature was reproduced in the tail unit, giving the Spitfire its characteristic sleek, head-turning shape. Incremental improvements throughout its history greatly increased its performance and longevity as a frontline fighter. For the Battle of Britain the most important enhancement was the replacement of the original wooden two-blade, fixed-pitch propeller with a constant-speed, three-blade design. The constant-speed propeller varied the angle at which the blades cut into the air to allow the engine to run at a constant rate. The result was an increase in the Spitfire’s operational ceiling. From mid-1940, Spitfires and Hurricanes were converted to the new propeller just in time for the Battle of Britain.

  When the Anzacs got hold of the Spitfire they were smitten. ‘Everything in the plane was strange,’ observed Spurdle the first time he squeezed himself into the machine:

  The tiny confined cockpit, the complexity of the instruments, levers, switches—the very power at instant command and, thrill of thrills, the potent gun button on the split spade-type joystick. And the reflector gunsight not a foot from my excited face. This was it! The dream come true! I looked out across each beautiful elliptic wing, camouflaged green and brown, with its roundels shining in the sun. The plane rolled forward at a faster pace than seemed safe, the throttle so sensitive to the slightest movement, the radio warmed into crackling life and the control tower gave me the okay for take-off.[8]

  In flight the Spitfire lived up to its promise. ‘Too many emotions of delight, pride, fear and complete out-of-this-world strangeness blurred,’ enthused Spurdle. ‘I was alone as never before with a thousand horsepower and this beautiful little aeroplane.’[9] Hillary was equally intoxicated by his first jaunt. His flight officer, an Irishman, stood on the wing and ran through the instruments with him: ‘I was conscious of his voice, but heard nothing of what he said. I was to fly a Spitfire.’ Upon landing, a close friend enquired ‘How was it?’ to which Hillary replied, ‘Money for old rope’ and made a circle of approval with his thumb and forefinger.[10] Before his next flight, he was told to ‘see if you can make her talk’. Given free rein, he ran through his repertoire of aerobatic manoeuvres ending with two flick rolls as he made for the airfield. ‘I was filled with a sudden exhilarating confidence,’ noted Hillary. ‘I could fly a Spitfire.’

  Yet the Spitfire was not without its idiosyncrasies. As Gray noted, it needed a ‘fairly delicate touch’. In particular, on take-off, it had a disconcerting tendency to swing to the left that had to be countered by applying full right rudder until sufficient speed had been built up. Nevertheless, Gray, who flew both the Hurricane and Spitfire in battle, was in no doubt which was the superior machine. To his mind the Hurricane was, in comparison, a sluggish aircraft, whereas the Spitfire, ‘being so much more responsive, handled like a high-performance sports car.’[11] This was borne out during the war as Spitfires increasingly replaced Hurricanes across Fighter Command. Although Air Ministry orders for both machines were put out in the mid-1930s, the journey from design to production was smoother for the Hurricane. The marriage of tradition and modern features meant that its production commenced as soon as the order was made. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, 18 squadrons were equipped with some 400 Hurricanes, but only nine squadrons with Spitfires.[12]

  Many of the Anzacs believed that the delay afforded the RAF by the phoney war was a key determinant in their Battle of Britain survival.[13] Gray pointed out that in December 1939 he had only seven hours’ flying time in Spitfires. However, by the time he was thrust into battle five months later he had amassed many more. ‘In retrospect I consider 100 hours on type to be about right before being considered combat-ready for the first time—if only one had a choice in the matter—certainly not ten or twelve, which was about all some of our replacement pilots had at the height of the Battle of Britain.’[14] Deere went as far as to suggest that even the compromises of a year earlier in Munich were a blessing in disguise for RAF airmen.[15] Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s September 1938 acceptance of Hitler’s offer at Munich has since entered the popular imagination as utterly wrong-headed, the height of appeasement of the Nazi regime, but at the time it did delay direct combat with a Luftwaffe that had a powerful advantage over Fighter Command in machines and experienced pilots. Munich and the phoney war allowed Anzac pilots the opportunity to gain valuable flying experience outside the demands of actual combat, including the occasional life-threatening mishap.

  Olive’s boredom was broken one particularly cold morning when, as one of the more experienced pilots, he was sent aloft to gauge the flying conditions for the rest of the squadron. As he pulled the Spitfire skywards the cockpit was engulfed with white smoke billowing from the engine. In order to clear his field of vision, Olive put the Spitfire into a series of violent manoeuvres. His eventual landing was a lucky escape as the antifreeze glycol running though the radiator had found its way onto the hot engine via a ruptured pipe. This could prove fatal, since glycol was almost as flammable as aviation fuel and often in such situations the pilot and machine were lost.[16]

  In another unfortunate incident, the freshly arrived Gray made himself known not only to his new 54 Squadron pilots, but also higher ranked RAF officials. With only about 20 hours on Spitfires at that time, G
ray made a sweeping curve on his approach to Hornchurch in order to get a good look at the field before landing—like all Spitfire pilots, he was aware of the serious forward and downward visibility deficiencies of the aircraft. At the same time he noted a large black car travelling around the airfield perimeter track as he selected his landing area. Gray judged that he would easily clear the sedan. However, he failed to observe a poorly placed sandbagged aircraft dispersal bay thirty yards inside the perimeter track. Gray’s undercarriage was sheared clean off as it clipped the top bags on the eight-foot-high bay. Unfortunately for the Kiwi airman, the large black vehicle was occupied by not only the station commander but also Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command. To make matters worse, Dowding had specifically requested that his driver slow down so they could ‘watch this young pilot land’. As he saw Gray belly-flop and plough up the airfield, Dowding turned to the station commander and exclaimed that ‘I could have sworn that the pilot had his wheels down!’[17] Adding insult to injury, Gray was battered by the full brunt of the station commander’s ire after being marched into his office. With dented ego and crash-induced black eyes, Gray was threatened with drogue-towing duty. The young New Zealander survived the threat only to face a much sterner test and foretaste of what lay ahead, when the Germans began their campaign in Western Europe on 10 May 1940.

  France Falls

  Within four days the neutral Netherlands had been crushed and the Belgians were in disorganised retreat. Shattering the phoney war, the main German effort sliced through the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest and then pushed a sickle-cut north to the French coast. The invasion gave a number of the Anzacs their first opportunity to test themselves and their machines against the Luftwaffe. One of the few Anzac pilots on hand to meet the Germans was Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain. The lanky New Zealander of 73 Squadron had been posted, as part of the RAF Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), to support the British Expeditionary Force in France. He became a household name thanks to a string of victories that went back to his first kill, a bomber over Metz. Utilising the newly introduced three-blade propeller, Kain pushed his Hurricane to what at the time was an unheard-of combat altitude of 27,000 feet. The Times relayed the drama to its readers:

  A brilliant single-handed action was fought by an RAF pilot five miles high over an RAF aerodrome in France this morning in which one of the latest types of German reconnaissance aircraft was shot down and its crew killed. It plunged vertically into a village street and parts of the machine were buried 10 ft in the hard road; pieces were scattered over an orchard and churchyard near there. The pilot was a New Zealander, 21 years old.[18]

  By March 1940, with over five victory credits to his name, Kain was the first Commonwealth ace of the war and was duly awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).[19]

  Another Anzac who acquitted himself well in the early fighting in France was South Australian Leslie Clisby. Like Kain, the twenty-five-year-old was provided with ample targets by the German invasion.[20] The Australian was an almost reckless pilot, habitually disregarding unfavourable odds when throwing his fighter into action. Fiercely proud of his ‘down-under’ homeland, he had continued to wear his increasingly threadbare and fraying Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) uniform rather than the RAF’s lighter sky-blue colours.[21] Although the records are fragmentary, due mostly to the haste in which the AASF subsequently fled France, the Australian Battle of Britain biographer Dennis Newton has estimated that in a six-day period, Clisby was officially credited with eight successes but in fact may well have accounted for fifteen German aircraft.

  Kain, Clisby and other Anzacs were able to test their new fighters against the best on offer from the German air force: the Messerschmitt Me 109.[22] Significantly faster than the Hurricane (328 mph), the Me 109 (357 mph) was a good match for the Spitfire (361 mph). Although the Spitfire and the Me 109 had an almost identical climb rate, the latter could operate at the higher altitude of 36,000 feet. Like the Spitfire, the Messerschmitt was an all-metal monocoque construction. If the Spitfire was drop-dead curvaceous in the eyes of many pilots, the Messerschmitt exuded an aggressive, shark-like appearance with its yellow snub nose, clipped wings and squared-off canopy. Like the Spitfire, the Messerschmitt’s efficient lines and adaptable design meant it was still in active service by war’s end.

  The Me 109’s venerable 12-cylinder Daimler-Benz engine compared favourably with the Merlin with the added advantage that it was fuel-injected as opposed to the carburettor-equipped British design. The Merlin was therefore plagued by fuel starvation when RAF pilots threw it into a dive as centrifugal forces came into action, while the fuel-injected Daimler-Benz motor did not miss a beat. Although RAF pilots worked around this deficiency by half-rolling the Hurricane and Spitfire before diving, forcing fuel into, rather than out of, the engine, it did offer Luftwaffe pilots a slight edge under negative g-forces.[23] While pilots on both sides argued that their own aircraft had the tightest turning circle—a vital performance characteristic in a dogfight—the Spitfire edged out the Me 109, if only marginally.

  With regards to armament, the German fighter’s two fuselage-mounted 7.9 mm machine-guns and two wing-mounted 20 mm cannon appeared to hold an edge over the Hurricane and Spitfire’s eight 0.303 inch Browning machine-guns. The distinguishing feature was the cannon—essentially exploding bullets. Cannon was seen as the way of the future but the Me 109’s early cannon design was tempered by a relatively low velocity and rate of fire—520 rounds per minute compared with the Browning’s 1200. In fighter-on-fighter combat the machine-gun appeared somewhat more advantageous but less so when applied against more resilient German bombers. Notwithstanding these limitations, in the eventual fighter-on-fighter contest, the two machines were remarkably even in their combat capabilities.

  Augmenting the Luftwaffe fighter strength was the much-vaunted Messerschmitt Me 110. A twin-engine heavy fighter with a two-man crew and powered by two DB 601A engines, the Me 110 was designed to overcome the Me 109’s limited operational radius. The result was a fighter that had a 1094 km (680 mile) range and a healthy top speed that rested between that of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. Its other strength was a forward-firing armament of four 7.9 mm machine-guns and two 20 mm cannons. This was supplemented by a rear gunner firing a light machine-gun. The Me 110 had ardent support at the highest levels of the Luftwaffe (Hermann Göring nicknamed it ‘Ironsides’) and some of the Me 109 units were stripped of their best pilots to man what was believed to be an elite force.[24]

  In the early battles of the war, the Ironsides lived up to expectations. Its first stumble, however, followed in the wake of the German invasion of France when it encountered British single-engine fighters. Relatively large, the Me 110 was not only easily spotted but, when engaged by Hurricanes and Spitfires, proved unable to match the single-engine machines’ acceleration or manoeuvrability. In high-altitude escort duties it could hold its own, but in dogfights with British fighters in the Battle of Britain its limited agility would be exploited mercilessly by RAF pilots. The Me 110 found its true vocation as a night fighter later in the war.

  Tactics

  Nevertheless, over France the aerial battles were a decidedly uneven affair. Liberally supplied with pilots with battle experience in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, and the recent annihilation of Poland, the Luftwaffe was significantly stronger than the opposing French air force—the Armée de l’Air—and the British AASF. The Luftwaffe had 3500 modern aircraft dispersed between the two air fleets, while the French had on hand 1145 combat machines, many obsolete.[25] Augmenting these French fighters, the RAF had on average barely forty Hurricanes and twenty Gloster Gladiators for daily operations. On 14 May 1940, the RAF saw some of its heaviest losses with a total of twenty-seven Hurricanes shot down, fifteen pilots killed and two fatally wounded. Clisby was among those lost. Fatigued and looking much older than his twenty-six years, the Australian was once again applying his maxim, ‘the best form of defen
ce is offence’, when he lost his life. In the unconfirmed accounts of his last action, his flight jumped more than thirty Me 109s. In the resulting mêlée he is believed to have shot down two machines before succumbing to the enemy. He died unaware that he had just been awarded a DFC.

  The period 10 to 21 May was brutal for the RAF fighter pilots, with a total of fifty-six losing their lives and a further thirty-six wounded. Eighteen who survived their aircraft’s destruction were taken prisoner.[26] By now it was clear that France would not withstand the German juggernaut and RAF men and machines were gradually retreated to England. On the ground in France, the Allied forces caught north of the German ‘sickle-cut’ were herded into a pocket on the beaches of Dunkirk. In order to save what remained of the nearly half a million British and French men clustered on the coast, an evacuation was to be attempted. The RAF’s role was to protect the lines of Allied men snaking out from the beaches into the surf off Dunkirk and the awaiting vessels. Up to this point, Dowding had been reluctant to expend his most potent weapon in France; now he put into the fray limited numbers of Spitfires operating from bases in south-east England.

  The Spitfire sorties demonstrated a stark difference in air-fighting tactics, which would have a significant effect on the Battle of Britain. At 2.30p.m. on 23 May 1940, Deere was bound for France. As he closed in on the coast, a voice screeched over the radio, ‘Tallyho, tallyho, enemy aircraft above and ahead.’ A large number of German bombers were cruising towards Dunkirk. The formation leader ordered the fighters to break off into a sequenced Fighting Area Attack: ‘Hornet squadron, No.5 attack, No.5 attack.’ Deere recounts the results:

  Simultaneously the sections fanned out into the various echelons necessary for this type of attack and as they did so individual pilots selected a particular bomber target. So far, all very nice and exactly according to the book. But we had reckoned without the interference from fighter escort; after all no consideration had been given to it in designing this type of attack, and our peacetime training had not envisaged interference from escort fighters. Experience is dearly bought.