Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop
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Название: Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940
Автор: Patrick Bishop
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007381180
isbn:
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.
The new pilots had been recruited to fly a new generation of fighter aeroplanes, but the machines were painfully slow in reaching the squadrons. The first Hurricanes did not appear in service until January 1938, when 111 Squadron became the first unit to receive them. It was August, and the eve of the Munich crisis, before 19 Squadron took delivery of the first Spitfires. At the end of the year most fighter squadrons were still flying biplanes.
Ronald Brown, the ex-Halton boy who had been selected for flying training, was a sergeant pilot at Northolt with 111 Squadron when the Hurricanes arrived. The squadron commander and flight commanders were the first to test them. Then it was the turn of the junior pilots. They were told to keep the undercarriage lowered in order to reduce speed. The great power of the Merlin engine, twice as potent as anything they had previously known, would take time to adjust to, it was thought. Brown, even though it was the first time he had handled a monoplane, in fact found it ‘quite an easy plane to fly’.1 Most pilots’ accounts of their experience of the Hurricane, however, reveal a mixture of trepidation and elation. Roland Beamont remembered ‘a feeling of exhilaration with all this power and being able to get up to 300 miles an hour on the air-speed indicator very easily in a shallow dive at any point in your flight. This was a great experience for an eighteen-year-old.’2 The Gloster Gauntlets and Gladiators, which represented the zenith of biplane fighter design and served as a stopgap with many fighter squadrons while the new monoplanes were brought in, could manage only 230 and 255 m.p.h. respectively.
For pilots used to biplanes, the Hurricane seemed to take a long time to get airborne. Initially it had a fixed-pitch, twin-bladed propeller that only allowed one setting. With variable-pitch propellers, which were soon to come in, the pilot put the airscrew in ‘fine’ for take-off. This provided less speed but more power, giving maximum thrust – the equivalent in motoring terms of first gear. Once aloft, the pilot changed to ‘coarse’, altering the angle of the propeller blade so that it was taking bigger bites out of the air, generating less power but more speed. Later both types would be fitted with constant-speed governors that adjusted the blade angles automatically. Beamont thought flying a Hurricane was ‘simple, straightforward’. Christopher Foxley-Norris found it reassuring. ‘You get into an aircraft and it gives you confidence. You get into another one and it doesn’t…[The Hurricane] was very stable but at the same time manoeuvrable. If you didn’t want it to do a turn it was absolutely rock stable. If you did turn it was very manoeuvrable.’3
The Hurricane was slower than a Spitfire but could turn more tightly. Its wide-legged undercarriage, which opened outwards, planting the aeroplane firmly on the ground, made it ‘very forgiving’, another advantage over the Spitfire, which balanced on a narrow wheelbase. The initial canvas-and-girder construction of the fuselage meant bullets and cannon shells could go straight through it without bringing the aircraft down, and its sturdy wings provided solid bracing for the eight Brownings. It was, everyone said, an ‘excellent gun platform’, better, in fact, than the Spitfire. The machine guns were arranged in two groups of four, as close in to the fuselage as they could be placed to clear the propeller. The Spitfire’s armament was spread out, with the outboard gun a third of the way in from the wing-tip; then a group of two, then an inboard gun on each wing, which could cause some flexing when the guns fired, making them less accurate. The Hurricane was fast and nimble but honest. It was not quite perfect. Pete Brothers discovered ‘it could fall out of the air if you mistreated it trying to be too clever’.
The arrival of the new fighters aroused the fervent interest of newspapers and newsreel companies. Brown remembered them making ‘an absolute meal of the Hurricane. We were wonderboys, travelling at vast speeds, pulling all this G [the heavy gravitational force exerted when turning]. We were getting constant visits from the press and staff colleges who wanted to see these things in action.’4 Having appeared before the Spitfire, the Hurricane was the first to plant itself in the public imagination, though its primacy did not long survive the arrival of its more beautiful sister. The public perception that it represented a battle-winning technical advance was encouraged by a government and military establishment anxious to reassure citizens that the criticisms of the rearmament lobby were unfounded. Some pilots, used to the fixed wheels, open cockpits, broad flying surfaces and manageable speeds of the old types, wondered whether they would be able to cope. The difficulties which 111 Squadron had in making the transition СКАЧАТЬ