Fighter, p.17
Fighter, page 17
His rival had claimed his twenty-fifth victim about seven weeks previously, over France, but afterwards he was shot down and made a POW until the French armistice. Galland was determined to make the best of Mölders’s set-back. At midday on 24 July, Galland led his Messerschmitts into battle again, but the Luftwaffe were beginning to find the Spitfire a tough one to down. This morning, as we shall see, the Spitfires handed out rather more punishment than they took.
FIGURE 24. About 11 a.m., 24 July
A convoy (dotted line) left the river Medway and entered the Thames Estuary. It attracted a bombing raid consisting of Dornier Do 17s escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109s of the third Gruppe of JG 26, Schlageter, led by Galland.
(1) No. 54 Squadron was sent to intercept and a battle developed. While this was happening, 65 Squadron from Manston went to attack the now unescorted Dorniers. Tight formations and disciplined gunfire from the bombers prevented close attacks and they escaped without loss. Two of the forty Messerschmitts were shot down, and as they were all running short of fuel they dived out of combat and went home very low across Kent.
(2) Meanwhile 610 Squadron from Biggin Hill were sent to patrol Dover in the hope of cutting off the escape of Galland’s fighters.
(3) But another German fighter unit was coming to take over the escort duty. A fight developed between these Messerschmitts and the Spitfires from Biggin Hill.
July was a month of experiments. Kesselring discovered that attacking two coastal convoys at the same time forced the defence to divide. This worked well about 8 a.m. on 24 July, when two co-ordinated attacks were made: one on a convoy off Dover and the other on one that was entering the Thames Estuary. The defence – 54 Squadron from Rochford – sent after one raid, saw both, and had to split up to attack them. The raiders escaped without casualties but the bombing failed to hit any of the ships. About 11 a.m. two Staffeln of Do 17s returned to the Thames Estuary to attack a convoy. ‘Dolfo’ Galland’s Bf 109s were assigned as escort. Park sent 54 Squadron to attack them, and then, knowing that Galland’s fighter escort would soon run short of fuel, he ordered 610 Squadron (Biggin Hill) to patrol Dover, and so cut off their escape route. In fact, 610 ran into JG 52, who were coming north to help the returning Messerschmitts. There was a fight. The raid’s escort – Galland’s III/JG 26 – and JG 52 each lost three fighters. The two RAF squadrons lost three Spitfires.
As the engagement ended, the elated Spitfire pilots dived upon another formation, and shot down one of them. The victorious pilot reported that there had been no return fire and identified his victim as a Chance Vought V.156. RAF intelligence thought the Germans were so short of aircraft that they were now using captured French ones, until the Royal Navy reported the loss of a Blackburn Skua of 806 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm.
The fighter pilots were learning about their adversaries. The Bf 109, with its fuel-injection engine, not only dived without missing a beat or two (unlike the carburettor-fed Merlins) but could out-dive the RAF fighters. Galland’s Messerschmitts had dived out of combat and escaped that morning when their fuel ran low.
But the Luftwaffe had never before faced a fighter as good as the Spitfire. This was acknowledged by the disproportionate number of Messerschmitt fighter pilots who, on becoming POWs, insisted that they had been shot down by Spitfires. The Hurricane pilots, who sometimes had their claims disallowed because of it, called it ‘Spitfire snobbery’.
FIGURE 25. Galland and Mölders
Udet drew the two famous fighter aces as rival huntsmen. Galland, on the left, with Groucho Marx cigar and moustache, and the solemn ‘Daddy’ Mölders, on the right, are counting the bag.
RAF regulations said that the eight Brownings should be adjusted so that the bullets converged at a point some 650 yards ahead of the aircraft. As one pilot of 54 Squadron said at the time, ‘All this guarantees is a few hits by the indifferent shot; the good shot on the other hand is penalised.’ The pilots who were prepared to get close were scattering gunfire all over the place.
Already the regulations were being ignored. Armament Officers were having the guns adjusted the way the pilots wanted them (and eventually this was officially approved).
The courage to fly very close distinguished just about all the men who became aces, but without the skill of deflection-shooting such a pilot could not make a kill. This aiming-off is not to be equated with the hunter shooting at a bird in flight. The fighter pilots were moving at three or four hundred miles an hour in three dimensions. And so was the target. To hit it required an instant assessment of enemy speed, enemy size, angle between the two aircraft, and the distance. (Later in the war there were gun-sights that did some of this calculation, but in 1940 pilots on both sides had only a ring sight reflected on the windscreen.) The split-second judgment required for this kind of fighting was something that many superb pilots were never able to acquire.
In the First World War, some ace fighter pilots had become obsessional about the types of bullet they used, arranging them in the belts in certain set sequences according to personal taste. The provision of eight separate identical guns made varying the ammunition very simple. A common mix was four guns with normal bullets, two with armour-piercing and two with the new De Wilde incendiaries. This later ammunition was very popular with the fighter pilots. Dowding said that they valued it far beyond its true worth but he was not taking into account the way that, although it had no tracer or smoke trail as previous incendiary bullets had, it made a bright yellow flash on impact. This proved a valuable aiming device. Believing that his pilots should have what they wanted, Dowding made special efforts to increase supplies of the De Wilde bullets. ‘Sailor’ Malan and Al Deere believed that the 250-yard harmonisation and De Wilde bullets made the difference between damaging enemy aircraft and destroying them.
During July the fighter pilots rediscovered that aerial victory went to the formation that caught an enemy unaware. The old hands attacked out of the sun, and visibility was the paramount factor in the fighter pilot’s war. German pilots who had found their Emils good enough for Spain, Poland and France, now demanded a better clearview cockpit cover. RAF pilots were constrained by their Irving flying suits, gloves, and the seat’s Sutton harness which, one inspector said, ‘seemed specially designed to foul oxygen and wireless leads’. The RAF flying helmets had earphones that tangled into the collar part of the ‘Mae West’ life jackets. To relieve themselves of this tangle many pilots adjusted the cockpit heaters and flew in uniform jackets or shirt-sleeves.
But for the ground staff there were few days suitable for shirt-sleeves. July was a month of dull, wet weather: haze, drizzle, low cloud, electrical storms and even fog. Often it was the appalling visibility that enabled a convoy to get through the Channel intact. There was so much rain that some airfields on both sides were made unusable by flooding.
And then 25 July provided one of the rare breaks in the bad weather: the morning sky was blue.
25 July
Kesselring was playing cat and mouse with a convoy through the Dover Straits. CW8 (west-bound coal convoy number eight) consisted of 21 colliers and coasters. Only 11 passed Dungeness, and only 2 got to their destination undamaged. Just after noon, a force of Bf 109s headed for Dover, flying almost at sea level. They were a device to bring the RAF fighters down to sea level and so give a clear run to the Stukas. No. 65 Squadron went down to fight. All the aircraft were so low that when one Bf 109 – of JG 52 – misjudged an attack, he hit the water and disintegrated.
Hurricanes of 32 Squadron from Biggin Hill and 615 Squadron from Kenley joined the fighting against forty Bf 109s. There is an old fighter pilot’s maxim, ‘Never throttle back in combat,’ and maximum boost caused both sides to run low on fuel after only a few minutes. As the fighters disengaged, three Stukageschwader came in at medium altitude and dive-bombed the now-unprotected convoy.
The convoy’s naval escort put up anti-aircraft fire and called urgently for fighter cover. Nine Spitfires of 54 Squadron hurried to their aid. When they arrived they found Kesselring had sent an overwhelming force of Bf 109s there to wait for them. Among 54 Squadron’s losses was a flight commander. None of the German fighters was shot down.
The Sector Controller realised that if he answered the German attacks plane for plane, he would be bled dry. So at 2:30 that afternoon, when thirty Ju 88s came to bomb the convoy, he sent only eight Spitfires of 64 Squadron. They met a fighter escort of fifty Bf 109s. Undismayed, the newly appointed squadron commander called ‘Tally-Ho!’ and attacked. The Controller sent the rest of 64 Squadron – three Spitfires – and 111 Squadron, to the battle. The latter formed up line-abreast and did a head-on attack on the Junkers bombers, which broke formation and turned away. On seeing this, the Messerschmitts of the fighter escort also withdrew.
But it was still only afternoon: the men of the convoy had not yet earned their day’s pay. As they passed Folkestone, the Bf 109s repeatedly strafed them at sea level, gaining the naval gunners’ attention so that about sixty Stukas could dive-bomb them out of the afternoon sun. The attack had been nicely timed between RAF patrols, and with unhurried precision they sank five ships and damaged four. At this moment, a force of German motor torpedo boats attacked the convoy too. By nightfall two damaged destroyers moved into Dover harbour; one of them was under tow. The Admiralty concluded that coastal convoys should no longer try to get through the Straits of Dover except under cover of darkness.
Although Fighter Command had lost only seven aircraft – against sixteen German raiders shot down – it had nothing to celebrate. No. 54 Squadron was retired north for a rest. In its three weeks in action the Squadron had lost five pilots killed – including a very experienced flight commander – and three pilots wounded. It had flown 800 hours, completed 504 combat sorties, and lost twelve aircraft.* It was a warning of what could happen to the whole of Fighter Command if it was drawn into ever larger battles. Instead of cancelling the coastal convoys – the cargoes were coal, which could have been moved by rail and later was – the Admiralty and Air Ministry pressed Dowding to commit more of his fighter force to protecting the shipping. Dowding resisted.
The US ambassador in London – Joseph Kennedy, the father of the man who became President – had little faith in Britain’s ability to survive, and he didn’t mind who knew it. As early as 1 July the British Prime Minister had written in his diary, ‘Saw Joe Kennedy who says everyone in USA thinks we shall be beaten before the end of the month.’ Now there was only a week of it left. The British Foreign Office heard that Kennedy had summoned neutral journalists to a press conference in order to tell them that Hitler would be in London by 15 August. Such behaviour infuriated Foreign Office officials – one wrote, ‘He is the biggest Fifth Columnist in the country’ – but there was little they could do about him. Joseph Kennedy wielded great political influence in the USA (and had got the London Embassy in recognition of past help). Now it was election year in the USA. President Roosevelt was running against Wendell Wilkie for an unprecedented third term. He needed Kennedy’s support to win the election, and the British wanted Roosevelt to win. It was a dilemma for all concerned, not least for the Americans, who didn’t want to send expensive war supplies to a nation just about to collapse.
To get a second opinion, Roosevelt sent another Irish-American to Britain. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was ostensibly in England to study the extent of German espionage and the nature of British counter-measures. In fact, he was to report to Roosevelt Britain’s chances of survival. Sending a man on an intelligence mission that was really a cover for a diplomatic function was a curious reversal of the usual way of doing such things.
28 July
A few days later, the storm clouds again gave way to a clear blue sky. At about 2 p.m., when most of England was sitting down to the ritual of Sunday lunch, something happened that was so unusual in the air war that this might have been unique: two ace pilots clashed in combat.
The South African ‘Sailor’ Malan ended the war as one of the top-scoring aces on the Allied side. He was important, too, for the influence he had upon RAF tactics and formations.
Born in Wellington, South Africa, Adolphus Malan was a man of burly build with an amiable smile that made the men who met him unready for the deep and clinical hatred that he had for his German opponents. He told one of his fellow officers that to badly damage enemy bombers – so that they arrived home with dead and dying aboard – was better than shooting them down: it had more effect on Luftwaffe morale. So that is what he tried to do.
Malan had been a merchant navy officer before volunteering for the RAF in 1935. He proved to be an exceptional pilot, according to his flying instructors. He was a flight commander by the time he saw action in May 1940. On the receiving end of his bullets this day was an even more revered master of the fighter pilot’s trade: the legendary Mölders. Both men have been mentioned by their peers as possibly the greatest fighter pilots of the war.
Werner Mölders was a handsome young man whose drawn face, deepset eyes, bony nose and thin mouth were seldom captured on film in the act of smiling. He was an introverted man, and this serious demeanour earned him the nickname ‘Vati’ (‘Daddy’). So determined was he to be a fighter pilot that (like many others before and since) he endured the agonies and humiliation of constant air sickness.
Mölders took over Galland’s command in Spain just as the new Bf 109 fighters replaced the old biplanes. This changed the odds and he returned to Germany with fourteen destroyed enemy aircraft in his log book. He was a skilled administrator and a dedicated teacher, as well as Germany’s top fighter ace. Many Nazis took exception to the way that ‘Vati’ Mölders made no secret of his Catholic religion, but Göring made quite sure that no harm came to him on that account. In 1940 it was decided that the coveted Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross would be given to a pilot who shot down twenty enemy planes. Mölders was the first fighter pilot to get it. He was to become the Luftwaffe’s General of Fighters before his twenty-ninth birthday.
Sunday 28 July was an auspicious day for Mölders. This was his first day as Kommodore of the entire JG 51. (The previous day ‘Onkel Theo’ Osterkamp had gone to become Jafü 2, the commander of all the fighter planes in Air Fleet 2.) Concerned as he might be by his seven weeks out of action, and the victories of Galland and Hauptmann Helmut Wick (the other two top German aces), Werner Mölders could this day reflect with satisfaction that he was the youngest Kommodore in the Luftwaffe.
With Mölders there were four Staffeln of Messerschmitts, and in keeping with Fighter Command policy, Spitfires were sent against them, while Hurricanes were vectored on to the German bomber formation. ‘Sailor’ Malan was leading twelve Spitfires of 74 Squadron from Manston. As they closed, Malan chose a victim in the leading flight, fired, and watched him go down. Mölders was leading that formation; he turned and shot down a Spitfire. For Mölders this was his 129th combat mission of the war and his twenty-sixth victory (not including the fourteen aircraft shot down in Spain). He came round again, looking for his twenty-seventh.
Both Mölders and Malan were fast, but Mölders was split-seconds faster. Even as Malan was scoring his victory, Mölders was already on his tail. Malan turned in towards the attack – the classic reaction of the fighter pilot – and kept turning tightly enough to bring Mölders into his sights. His machine-gun bullets raked the Messerschmitt. Had Spitfires been armed with cannon, Mölders would not have been able to nurse his badly damaged machine back to his base at Wissant. When he landed, his leg wounds were bad enough to put him into hospital. It was to be another month before Mölders could claim victim number twenty-seven.
Enough Messerschmitt pilots failed to make it back across the Channel for German rescue float-planes to be sent out to search for them. These large twin-engined rescue aircraft were painted white, with eight large red crosses in evidence. The Air Ministry had decided that any seen near Allied shipping or the English coast should be shot down. This instruction had been passed to all squadrons on 14 July, and in keeping with it, Hurricanes of 111 Squadron shot one down into mid-Channel and did considerable damage to another that was on the water ten miles west of Boulogne.
The resulting controversy was not confirmed to the rival propaganda industries. Some RAF pilots vowed that they would not obey such an instruction. Others wanted to see it in writing. Publication of this Air Ministry Order, on 29 July, with its legalistic phrasing and vague talk of confining such attacks upon unarmed aircraft to ‘areas in which operations are in progress’, did nothing to improve matters or even clarify them. For it was only where operations were in progress that drowning aviators would be found.
Mölders’s badly damaged fighter plane provides an example of another problem. On this day alone, two Junkers Ju 88 bombers of 9/KG 4, the General Wever Geschwader based at Amsterdam-Schipol, were damaged by anti-aircraft gunfire over the Thames Estuary. One did not get back as far as its base. Both crashed on landing and were completely written off. Almost all the survivors were wounded. Another Ju 88 of the Edelweiss Geschwader – had engine failure, and forced-landed heavily enough to be severely damaged. Neither was Mölders’s Bf 109 the only fighter that would not be ready to fly next day, or for many days after that. Official Luftwaffe records show a Bf 109 of 11/JG 27 crash-landed away from its base, with its pilot wounded. It was badly damaged, and two more Bf 109s were written off in crash landings, one of which killed the pilot. Two more fighters of JG 51 were damaged in forced landings that afternoon, and there was the Heinkel float-plane damaged near Boulogne, and a Do 17Z of KG 2 that was written off in an accident that had nothing to do with enemy action.
