Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop

Чтение книги онлайн.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ