FINEST HOUR : The Battle of Britain

Book by Phil Craig Tim Clayton

Chapter 1: May 10-14, 1940

RAF 85 Squadron

SECLIN, NEAR LILLE, FRANCE

The pilots awoke to the urgent battering of antiaircraft fire. Richard "Dickey" Lee, Benjy Angus, and "Paddy" Hemingway tumbled out into the dawn. Denis Wissler followed them to the door of their sleeping quarters. "Look, up there!" High above the control tower orange flashes filled the sky over Lille. Somewhere a phone was ringing. Moments later Lee was sprinting across the dewy grass of Seclin airfield to his Hurricane: VY R. VY for 85 Squadron, R for Richard. Angus and Hemingway followed. B Flight took off, first Lee, then the others. Farther away a section of three planes from A Flight was already racing along the strip.

All through Friday, May 10, they flew patrols in sections of three. Armorers, in shirtsleeves in the baking heat, hauled out case after case of machine-gun belts. Dusty fuel trucks trundled across the airfield, ready for the next time the planes came back. Refueled and rearmed, the fighters roared up again into the haze. All day the sun beat down and the score mounted. A Flight claimed five before breakfast. The ground crew cheered and slapped the pilots' backs. Some photographers were there, snapping away for the government. They photographed the armorers at work, they photographed the pilots as they landed, and they photographed A Flight as a group, minus one pilot who was now in hospital with a cut eye after a bullet smashed his cockpit cover. Denis Wissler had been with the squadron for a week. He did not even know the name of the man in hospital. His own flight, B Flight, had done well too. Dickey Lee came back with several holes in his aircraft and a graze to his leg, but by the end of the day he had been awarded two kills. Benjy Angus, the Canadian, had bailed out over Belgium. He phoned through later to say that he was okay. No one had been killed or even seriously injured, and the total claim for the day was sixteen. Bombers everywhere, with little in the way of fighter protection.

Wissler hadn't flown. Squadron Leader Oliver had told him gently that he was too inexperienced for combat. He'd spent the day scanning the skies enviously from outside the officers' mess.

2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment

ORCHIES, NEAR LILLE

Someone was hammering on the door of the billet. Private Ernie Leggett pulled the curtain from the window and looked outside. In the gray first light, Company Sergeant Major George Gristock was barking instructions. As his head cleared, Leggett searched frantically for his wristwatch and stumbled out onto the Rue de la Gare, where the men stationed in Orchies were already mustering. There was a thunder of guns from the direction of Lille and a red glow in the sky over the air bases less than ten miles away. Sergeant Gristock ordered the company out on parade. One hundred and twenty men, A Company of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, stood to attention as he shouted: "Get your kit together, we're moving out now." They were no more than a mile from Orchies, about halfway to the forest of Marchiennes, when German bombers flew over fast and low and plumes of smoke rose from their billets around the station. The men climbed out of the ditches by the road, dusted themselves down, looked back for a few moments, and hurried on toward the safety of the trees.

Rabbits bolted at the sound of marching boots. The oak trees reminded Leggett of home. He was a country boy, raised in a scattered hamlet called Clippesby a couple of miles from Filby Broad. He used to walk two miles to school in one direction and a mile to church in the other. His father was a farm laborer; his brother had been crippled in an accident and could no longer work. At eleven Leggett passed the exam that entitled him to go to Yarmouth grammar school, but his parents could not afford the uniform.

Farmwork was hard to find and so Leggett, aged sixteen, joined the army. Army life suited him; he was tall and strong and he liked to look smart. Each week he saved some of his ten shillings pay to send to his mother. He had shot rabbits with his brother from earliest boyhood and now he won marksman's badges for both rifle and Bren light machine gun. The Bren, with a distinctive banana clip on top, fired five hundred rounds per minute and could slice through the trunk of a tree. But shooting at anything other than targets had seemed a distant prospect during three happy years in Gibraltar. Then war had come. "We were the boys who met the enemy eye-to-eye and we would have to do the fighting. It suddenly sunk into our brains, not only me but other people as well -- what the hell have we done?"

All day the soldiers shuffled about, talking in hushed voices, brewing tea and waiting for their marching orders. Sunlight flickered through the shielding canopy of trees. Leggett felt his stomach turning over with anxiety. He was determined to do his best. The only thing that unnerved him was the thought of close combat. "I just couldn't bear anything to do with bayonets -- using one or, even worse, being stabbed by one. We'd been taught all about it -- how to push it in, twist it, and rip it out -- and just the idea of it made me feel cold inside."

They would move under cover of darkness. As the light faded, Captain Peter Barclay, Sergeant Major Gristock, and some of the other sergeants came out carrying hurricane lamps. Barclay said, "Right-ho, lads, gather round, I've got something to tell you." A Company knelt round their captain in the gloom. It was his last words that they remembered: "Now more than ever your training will stand you in good stead. Keep your heads down and your spirits high, and from now on when you aim your rifle to shoot, you shoot to kill."

Impressed with these ominous instructions, the company formed up and marched away into the darkness. They crossed the Belgian frontier by back lanes and then met their transport. During the night they traveled unscathed but the roads were crowded and they were still in their lorries at dawn. German reconnaissance found them. "We heard the planes coming and we were given the order, 'Everybody out,' and we tumbled out of the back into the ditches and when we got back there was one man on the floor. A single bullet through the head had killed him. That was the first dead man I had ever seen in my life and of course it upset all of us."

Sergeant Major Gristock told his men to pull themselves together. But he looked up at the skies anxiously. Why was it that German aircraft could attack British infantry with such impunity? Where was the RAF?

* * *

The RAF was busy shooting down German planes all over northern and eastern France. But there were nothing like enough of them to cope with the hundreds of air attacks. The first light of day on May 10 had brought bombs screaming down on airfields and barracks all over France, Belgium, and Holland. Within hours half of the Belgian air force and nearly all the Dutch was destroyed on the ground. German paratroopers and glider forces were landing behind the front line. Waalhaven airport near Rotterdam was seized. Six RAF Blenheim fighter-bombers of 600 Squadron were sent there to destroy any aircraft on the ground. Only one returned home. The British Royal Air Force in France was under French command. Orders were slow to arrive and hesitant when they came. "At all costs avoid bombing built-up areas" was one injunction. Plans were quickly made to attack the advancing German units. But sending Britain's lumbering and lightly armed bombers against enemy forces protected by mobile antiaircraft guns and fighter cover was to invite disaster. Later that day four waves of eight Fairey Battle light bombers attempted to disrupt a German column advancing through Luxembourg. Thirteen were destroyed and all the surviving planes were damaged. It was hard to know where the main effort should go when every unit was calling for fighters and bombers simultaneously. And it proved almost impossible to guide fighters and bombers to the same place at the same time.

The RAF's remaining bombing force was practically eliminated in a series of attacks on the German armored divisions advancing through the Ardennes. On May 11 eight Fairey Battles attempted to bomb near Sedan. Seven were shot down. The RAF followed up with Blenheims. Five out of six were shot down. More Blenheims had been lost to German bombing in the morning. Of 114 Squadron's eighteen, carefully disposed around the fringes of an airfield near Reims, six were destroyed and the rest made unserviceable.

RAF 1 Squadron

BERRY-AU-BAC, CHAMPAGNE, FRANCE

Paul Richey was a pilot with No. 1 Squadron based near Reims. He had been in the Champagne country since the previous September, spoke fluent French, and had made many friends in the villages around the British airfields. On Friday, May 10, he got up at 3:00 A.M. At 5:00 A.M. his flight patrolled over Metz and shot down a single Dornier bomber. At midday they tried to rendezvous with Fairey Battles over Luxembourg but, though they waited, the bombers did not appear. Later in the day the squadron was moved to a new base at Berry-au-Bac. They arrived to discover there was, as yet, no telephone link and no tankers to refuel their Hurricanes.

The tired pilots dozed in the oppressive heat. Then they saw twenty German planes approaching -- Heinkel bombers. One peeled off and flew lazily toward them. "Then we heard it -- first a whisper, then a faint whistle that rose to an unearthly shriek that filled and split the heavens as if all the devils in hell had been let loose." Richey threw himself underneath a lorry as a stick of bombs overshot into a neighboring field where French villagers were plowing. The shock of the explosions made the lorry bounce up and down on its wheels. "We found them among the craters. The old man lay face-down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by in a state I will not describe. Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy -- recognizable only by a few tattered rags, a smashed boot, and some splinters of bone." Richey and his fellow pilots got some rifles and shot the stricken horses. "I imagined the German bombardier, heading for his base at eighteen thousand feet, entering in his log: 'Military Objective bombed, Berry-au-Bac, British airfield.'"

Next morning No. 1 Squadron got their fuel and their revenge. They ran into a formation of thirty Dorniers escorted by fifteen of the feared Messerschmitt 110 fighters, christened "Destroyers" by the Luftwaffe. The six Hurricanes caught the Messerschmitts by surprise and saw several go down in flames. Richey claimed two kills but then found himself alone with five enemy planes and was himself shot down after an engagement timed at fifteen minutes by an observer on the ground. As he drifted to earth at the end of his parachute he was surprised at how calm everything suddenly became. He spent the night in the French village where he landed, and it was not until he returned to Berry on May 12 that the experience began to unsettle him: "At this stage I began to feel peculiar. I had a hell of a headache and was jumpy and snappy....I dared not speak for fear of bursting into tears." An old lady in whose house he was billeted took him aside and said passionately, "Vous êtes destiné àvivre," but Richey was not convinced and that night found his sleep disturbed by thoughts of death: "Scarcely had I dropped off when I was in my Hurricane rushing head-on at a 110. Just as we were about to collide I woke with a jerk that nearly threw me out of bed. I was in a cold sweat, my heart banging wildly about...I shall never forget how I clung to the bed rail in a dead funk."

2nd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry

NEAR MOUCHIN, BELGIUM

"Get your men ready, we will be moving into Belgium." Martin McLane's mortar platoon hauled their boxes of ammunition and their heavy mortars into a lorry. Just as they were about to go, an officer ordered McLane to take temporary charge of a frontier control point at Mouchin. His men and his mortars went forward without him and McLane spent the rest of May 10 directing traffic.

McLane was the son of a shipyard worker, brought up in Bycker, Newcastle, in the north of England, a part of the world where the men who worked the steel imagined themselves wrought from the same substance. He should have been building ships, but in the early 1930s there were not many ships to build. Unemployment drove him into the army, where tough, resourceful lads were welcomed. Like Ernie Leggett, he found that he enjoyed the life. He was small and stocky with the build of a front-row forward, soon to be his position in the battalion rugby team. When the opposition made a mistake it would be McLane who was first to the muddy ball, winning possession for his team, as the other forwards drove over in support. The army soon spotted his potential and promoted him first to corporal, then to sergeant, then to platoon sergeant major. He could look after himself, could McLane, and the men respected him for it. They were a hard lot, his Durham lads, shipyard men like himself, and miners too. But they didn't dare take their sergeant on. He had drilled them into a solid unit and he was sure that they would do the job when the time came.

The 2nd Battalion Durham Light Infantry was one of those front-line units that got the best equipment the army had, the half-track Bren gun-carriers and the motorized mortar platoons. McLane was interested in new equipment and he had made the mortar platoon his own. His two three-inch mortars gave local artillery support to the whole battalion. It was quite a responsibility, and that was why he was wondering what he was doing standing around directing traffic. What was more, the Germans couldn't have chosen a worse day to start. One of his mortars had a worn-out tripod. He had applied for a replacement from stores and they had sent him something else by mistake. It was certain that only one of his mortars would work. He needed time to find a good site and bring up ammunition and night-sights and yet here he was manning a checkpoint.

He thought of his wife, Annie, and their new baby. He had seen his little girl only once. He took the worn photograph of them both out of his pocket, as another column of lorries rumbled by. They weren't lorries from his own division anymore, he could tell because their own 2nd Division lorries were marked with crossed keys painted white on the bumper. He seemed to have been left there and forgotten. He got on his motorcycle and rode north in search of his men.

2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment

NEAR WAVRE, BELGIUM

pard

As a child Ernie Leggett had sat in his family's pew at St. Peter's, Clippesby, gazing at the large stained glass window over the altar. The crossed keys of St. Peter fascinated him. Silver over gold, they seemed to shine when the sun hit them from the east. When he'd arrived in France his battalion had been put into 2nd Division. All around him, on shoulder flashes and painted onto half-tracks and lorries, were the same crossed keys. Leggett had thought it was a good omen. He had been traveling now for twenty-four hours, with several stops to shelter from strafing German planes. The Norfolks had tried firing their rifles and Bren guns back up at them, and once they were sure that they had hit something, but they had still seen no sign of a French or British fighter. Then, as they left their lorries near Wavre, they encountered a new kind of terror. "We heard these Stuka dive-bombers and the...