Memories of the Battle of Britain

[winny]

Inspired by Bobbysocks In their own words thread and due to the fact that we're getting close (in the UK) to Battle of Britain day, I thought I'd type out some of the many accounts of the people who fought that I've collected over the past year.

Flying Officer Al Deere (New Zealander) 54 Squadron

We were frightened. On the way out there was an awful gut fear. When you sighted them it really was quite a frightening sight. But once you got into combat there wasn't time to be frightened. But we were frightened - of course we were- the whole bloody time.
If you're in combat you're so keen to get the other guy and, save your own skin, that your adrenaline's pumping and there's no room for fright.

I've often wondered why there weren't more collisions. There were probably more than we knew about, because if somebody collided you didn't know about it. There was, in the initial engagement, a danger of collision.

They started bombing the airfields. 54 Squadron's forward base was Manston in Kent, which was the most forward airfield in England - we could see Calais from Manston. We operated from there. We used to go off from Hornchurch about half an hour before first light, land at Manston, and stay there all day.

We did sometimes four sorties a day, sometimes five, not always making combat, but being shot at and shot down. We very rarely arrived back with the same number of chaps we went out with.

One morning after we'd had a bit of a fight over a convoy, we were sent off to intercept a raid coming across the Channel at 3,000 - 4,000 feet. We went off south of Manston, and found some 109's at between 3,000 and 5,000 feet. Down in the water I could see a seaplane. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a German air-sea rescue plane, which had come in to try and pick up one of their pilots. I told Johhny Allen, who was in my sub-section to go down and get the seaplane, I'd look after the 109's.
Just at that moment the 109's saw us. They started to turn around just as we did, and I found myself in a circle going head-on towards a 109 coming from the opposite direction. I pressed my gun button more in hope than anything else, and I think we must have done the same thing.
I felt the bullets hit, and the next thing I knew we had collided. It was all very quick. I hit underneath him.
My engine seized straight away, and the cockpit filled with smoke, and flames appeared from the engine. I reached to open the hood only to discover that his propeller had struck the front of my windscreen and the whole fixture was so twisted that I could not move the hood. I could not see for smoke, but managed to acertain that I was headed inland.

Nearly blinded and choked, I succeeded in keeping the airspeed at about 100 mph. I just waited to hit the ground.
Suddenly there was a terrific jerk and I was tossed left, then right, and finally pitched hard forward on my straps, which fortunately held fast.
I'd hit the ground in an open field where there were a lot of anti-invasion posts. Of course I ploughed through these, and finally came to a halt.

The remains of my ammunition were going off in a series of pops and the flames were getting very near the cockpit. We had a little thing inside, a little jemmy thing, and I managed to smash my way out with that and my bare hands, got clear of the aircraft and ran to a safe distance.

I was pretty shaken and my eyebrows were singed, both my knees were bruised, but otherwise I was uninjured. The Spitfire was burning furiously in the middle of the cornfield and had left a trail of broken posts and pieces of wing, plus the complete tail section, extending for 200 yards.

A woman came from a house nearby and asked if I'd like a cup of tea. All I remember saying was, did she have anything stronger? She rang Manston and within a fairly quick time the ambulance was up, and took me back.

I was all right for flying the next day. I'd have preferred to take a breather, but we were just too short of pilots.

Sergeant Pilot Leslie Batt 338 Squadron

I saw a 109 coming down vertically from above me. He was going at a phenomenal rate of knots and suddenly his wings came off and they appeared to shoot upwards. He must have made such a hole in the ground that I thought, 'That's saved somebody from digging a grave.'

Flying Officer Harold Bird-Wilson 17 Squadron

We had a squadron commander who believed in the head-on attack.
'The next raid we go up to intercept, we will do a head on attack,' he said.
It turned out to be a head-on attack into an Me 110 and I'm afraid Jerry got the better of him and all we found of him was his shirt.


Pilot Officer David Crook 609 Squadron.

It's an odd thing when you are being fired at by a rear gunner that the stream of bullets seems to leave the machine very slowly and in a great outward curve. You chuckle to yourself, 'Ha, the fool's missing by miles!' then, suddenly, the bullets accelerate madly and curl in towards you again and flick just past your head.
You thereupon bend your head a little lower,mutter, 'My God,' or some other suitable expression, and try and kill the rear-gunner before he makes anymore nuisance of himself.

[Ze-Jamz]

Originally Posted by winny

Inspired by Bobbysocks In their own words thread and due to the fact that we're getting close (in the UK) to Battle of Britain day, I thought I'd type out some of the many accounts of the people who fought that I've collected over the past year.

Flying Officer Al Deere (New Zealander) 54 Squadron

We were frightened. On the way out there was an awful gut fear. When you sighted them it really was quite a frightening sight. But once you got into combat there wasn't time to be frightened. But we were frightened - of course we were- the whole bloody time.
If you're in combat you're so keen to get the oher guy and, save your own skin, that your adrenaline's pumping and there's no room for fright.

I've often wondered why there weren't more collisions. There were probably more than we knew about, because if somebody collided you didn't know about it. There was, in the initial engagement, a danger of collision.

They started bombing the airfields. 54 Squadron's forward base was Manston in Kent, which was the most forward airfield in England - we could see Calais from Manston. We operated from there. We used to go off from Hornchurch about half an hour before first light, land at Manston, and stay there all day.

We did sometimes four sorties a day, sometimes five, not always making combat, but being shot at and shot down. We very rarely arrived back with the same number of chaps we went out with.

One morning after we'd had a bit of a fight over a convoy, we were sent off to intercept a raid coming across the Channel at 3,000 - 4,000 feet. We went off south of Manston, and found some 109's at between 3,000 and 5,000 feet. Down in the water I could see a seaplane. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a German air-sea rescue plane, which had come in to try and pick up one of their pilots. I told Johhny Allen, who was in my sub-section to go down and get the seaplane, I'd look after the 109's.
Just at that moment the 109's saw us. They started to turn around just as we did, and I found myself in a circle going head-on towards a 109 coming from the opposite direction. I pressed my gun button more in hope than anything else, and I think we must have done the same thing.
I felt the bullets hit, and the next thing I knew we had collided. It was all very quick. I hit underneath him.
My engine seized straight away, and the cockpit filled with smoke, and flames appeared from the engine. I reached to open the hood only to discover that his propeller had struck the front of my windscreen and the whole fixture was so twisted that I could not move the hood. I could not see for smoke, but managed to acertain that I was headed inland.

Nearly blinded and choked, I succeeded in keeping the airspeed at about 100 mph. I just waited to hit the ground.
Suddenly there was a terrific jerk and I was tossed left, then right, and finally pitched hard forward on my straps, which fortunately held fast.
I'd hit the ground in an open field where there were a lot of anti-invasion posts. Of course I ploughed through these, and finally came to a halt.

The remains of my ammunition were going off in a series of pops and the flames were getting very near the cockpit. We had a little thing inside, a little jemmy thing, and I managed to smash my way out with that and my bare hands, got clear of the aircraft and ran to a safe distance.

I was pretty shaken and my eyebrows were singed, both my knees were bruised, but otherwise I was uninjured. The Spitfire was burning furiously in the middle of the cornfield and had left a trail of broken posts and pieces of wing, plus the complete tail section, extending for 200 yards.

A woman came from a house nearby and asked if I'd like a cup of tea. All I remember saying was, did she have anything stronger? She rang Manston and within a fairly quick time the ambulance was up, and took me back.

I was all right for flying the next day. I'd have preferred to take a breather, but we were just too short of pilots.

Sergeant Pilot Leslie Batt 338 Squadron

I saw a 109 coming down vertically from above me. He was going at a phenomenal rate of knots and suddenly his wings came off and they appeared to shoot upwards. He must have made such a hole in the ground that I thought, 'That's saved somebody from digging a grave.'

Flying Officer Harold Bird-Wilson 17 Squadron

We had a squadron commander who believed in the head-on attack.
'The next raid we go up to intercept, we will do a head on attack,' he said.
It turned out to be a head-on attack into an Me 110 and I'm afraid Jerry got the better of him and all we found of him was his shirt.


Pilot Officer David Crook 609 Squadron.

It's an odd thing when you are being fired at by a rear gunner that the stream of bullets seems to leave the machine very slowly and in a great outward curve. You chuckle to yourself, 'Ha, the fool's missing by miles!' then, suddenly, the bullets accelerate mady and curl in towards you again and flick just past your head.
You thereupon bend your head a little lower,mutter, 'My God,' or some other suitable expression, and try and kill the rear-gunner befor he makes anymore nuisance of himself.

Brilliant

[McQ59]

'A woman came from a house nearby and asked if I'd like a cup of tea.'
Good ol' Brittain...

Brilliant Winny

[bobbysocks]

keep them coming winny....if i get a chance i will dig some up as well in a day or two.

[winny]

Pilot Officer Frank Carey 43 Squadron

Air fighting is a very detatched sort of warfare, being fought, as it were, between machines with the human factor very much submerged in a 'tin box'.

Once in a while for a few fleeting seconds when someone bales out, one can suddenly be aware that humans are actually involved, but as the parachute descends, machines quickly regain the centre of the stage once more.

On one particular sortie from Wick, however, the human angle predominated for quite a while. The formation in which I was flying came upon a rather lonley He-111 way out in the North Sea which we naturally proceeded to deal with.
After a few shots a fire was seen to start in the fuselage and the flight commander immediately ordered us to stop attacking it.

The enemy aircraft turned back towards Wick and we escorted it on it's way with me in close formation on it's port side where the fire was.
Being only a few feet away from the Heinkel it was all too easy to become sympathetically associated with the crews frantic efforts to control the fire and I even began to wish that I could jump across and help them.
Thus I was suddenly converted from an anxious desire to destroy them to an even greater anxiety that they survive.

We had got within a few miles of the coast and had really begun to hope that they would make it, when we were all outraged to see a Hurricane from another squadron sweep in from behind, and without a single thought about us all around, poured a long burst of fire into the Heinkel which more or less blew up in our faces and crashed into the sea with no survivors.

It was all I could do to prevent myself from spinning around and having a crack at the Hurricane in response to it's action. I felt a sense of personal loss as I stared at the wreckage on the water - what dramatic changes of attitude in such a short space of time.

Flying Officer Michael Wainwright 64 squadron

On one occasion towards the end of the battle, an aircraft came along on my port side and I sensed something - and there was this 109 and he was waving at me. Then he went off.
I thought he was letting me know that if he had any bullets left he could have shot me down, but he'd obviously run out. Nobody believed me when I told them that.

[U2RATTLEHUM]

Thanks for the post. Would you like some tea.

[winny]

Originally Posted by U2RATTLEHUM

Thanks for the post. Would you like some tea.

Funny thing is the next story I'm going to post also ends up with a crash landed pilot being greeted by a woman with a cup of tea.. A very British battle indeed..

[olife]

Originally Posted by winny

Inspired by Bobbysocks In their own words thread and due to the fact that we're getting close (in the UK) to Battle of Britain day, I thought I'd type out some of the many accounts of the people who fought that I've collected over the past year.

Flying Officer Al Deere (New Zealander) 54 Squadron

We were frightened. On the way out there was an awful gut fear. When you sighted them it really was quite a frightening sight. But once you got into combat there wasn't time to be frightened. But we were frightened - of course we were- the whole bloody time.
If you're in combat you're so keen to get the other guy and, save your own skin, that your adrenaline's pumping and there's no room for fright.

I've often wondered why there weren't more collisions. There were probably more than we knew about, because if somebody collided you didn't know about it. There was, in the initial engagement, a danger of collision.

They started bombing the airfields. 54 Squadron's forward base was Manston in Kent, which was the most forward airfield in England - we could see Calais from Manston. We operated from there. We used to go off from Hornchurch about half an hour before first light, land at Manston, and stay there all day.

We did sometimes four sorties a day, sometimes five, not always making combat, but being shot at and shot down. We very rarely arrived back with the same number of chaps we went out with.

One morning after we'd had a bit of a fight over a convoy, we were sent off to intercept a raid coming across the Channel at 3,000 - 4,000 feet. We went off south of Manston, and found some 109's at between 3,000 and 5,000 feet. Down in the water I could see a seaplane. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a German air-sea rescue plane, which had come in to try and pick up one of their pilots. I told Johhny Allen, who was in my sub-section to go down and get the seaplane, I'd look after the 109's.
Just at that moment the 109's saw us. They started to turn around just as we did, and I found myself in a circle going head-on towards a 109 coming from the opposite direction. I pressed my gun button more in hope than anything else, and I think we must have done the same thing.
I felt the bullets hit, and the next thing I knew we had collided. It was all very quick. I hit underneath him.
My engine seized straight away, and the cockpit filled with smoke, and flames appeared from the engine. I reached to open the hood only to discover that his propeller had struck the front of my windscreen and the whole fixture was so twisted that I could not move the hood. I could not see for smoke, but managed to acertain that I was headed inland.

Nearly blinded and choked, I succeeded in keeping the airspeed at about 100 mph. I just waited to hit the ground.
Suddenly there was a terrific jerk and I was tossed left, then right, and finally pitched hard forward on my straps, which fortunately held fast.
I'd hit the ground in an open field where there were a lot of anti-invasion posts. Of course I ploughed through these, and finally came to a halt.

The remains of my ammunition were going off in a series of pops and the flames were getting very near the cockpit. We had a little thing inside, a little jemmy thing, and I managed to smash my way out with that and my bare hands, got clear of the aircraft and ran to a safe distance.

I was pretty shaken and my eyebrows were singed, both my knees were bruised, but otherwise I was uninjured. The Spitfire was burning furiously in the middle of the cornfield and had left a trail of broken posts and pieces of wing, plus the complete tail section, extending for 200 yards.

A woman came from a house nearby and asked if I'd like a cup of tea. All I remember saying was, did she have anything stronger? She rang Manston and within a fairly quick time the ambulance was up, and took me back.

I was all right for flying the next day. I'd have preferred to take a breather, but we were just too short of pilots.

Sergeant Pilot Leslie Batt 338 Squadron

I saw a 109 coming down vertically from above me. He was going at a phenomenal rate of knots and suddenly his wings came off and they appeared to shoot upwards. He must have made such a hole in the ground that I thought, 'That's saved somebody from digging a grave.'

Flying Officer Harold Bird-Wilson 17 Squadron

We had a squadron commander who believed in the head-on attack.
'The next raid we go up to intercept, we will do a head on attack,' he said.
It turned out to be a head-on attack into an Me 110 and I'm afraid Jerry got the better of him and all we found of him was his shirt.


Pilot Officer David Crook 609 Squadron.

It's an odd thing when you are being fired at by a rear gunner that the stream of bullets seems to leave the machine very slowly and in a great outward curve. You chuckle to yourself, 'Ha, the fool's missing by miles!' then, suddenly, the bullets accelerate madly and curl in towards you again and flick just past your head.
You thereupon bend your head a little lower,mutter, 'My God,' or some other suitable expression, and try and kill the rear-gunner before he makes anymore nuisance of himself.

very good work my friend!!!!

[winny]

Pilot Officer Tim Vigors 222 Squadron

On the last day of August I came close to getting killed.

We were diving from 25,000 feet on to a big formation of bombers. There was a lot of cloud and we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of them. I blazed away at a Dornier and then, like a fool, pulled up into a sharp left-hand turn without checking what was behind me.
Suddenly there was a crash as a cannon shell fired from a 109 tore broadside into my engine. The next one struck just behind the cockpit and exploded with a bang, sending most of it's particles whistling round the armour plating at my back. My instrumernt panel disintegrated in front of my eyes. The control column was nearly torn from my hands as the third shell hit the tail unit. Smoke and glycol poured from the engine and for a moment I was sure that I was on fire.

I was just reaching for the harness release when I found myself in thick cloud. There were no flames so, protected from the enemy for a moment by the enshrouding cloud, I decided to stay put until I could better assess the damage. My blind flying instruments had all shattered, so I had no way of telling whether I was flying upwards or downwards, or if I was the right way up. A moment later I slithered into clear air once more to find that I was diving straight for the centre of London.

I started to pull out of the dive. The controls felt funny, which was not surprising as more than half of the control surfaces on my tail unit had been shot away and most of my port aileron was missing. But the aircraft was still controllable and although there was a lot of smoke, there was no flame.

My immediate reaction was to bale out. Two things stopped me. First the ground was still about 7,000 feet below me and while there was no reason to believe that the parachute wouldn't open, it did look an awful long way to fall. Second, and more important, I was still smack over the middle of London. My aircraft would almost certainly crash on to a populated area, which might easily kill a lot of people, and I could end up maiming myself if my parachute landed me among buildings.

I decided to sit tight and try and land the aircraft in one piece. I started to glide in an easterly direction and, while losing height, searched desperatlely for a suitable landing site. I had already turned off the petrol and, although there was a lot of white smoke from the broken glycol leads, I assessed the danger of fire as reasonably remote. The controls, particularly the fore and aft reactions, felt very sloppy. Also in order to see in front of me, I had to crab the aircraft to make the smoke fly off to one side. When I was down to about 2,000 feet I spotted a large field about 300 yards square, surrounded by small suburban houses.
Although the field was certainly not an easy place to land a Spitfire under the very best of conditions, by now I had no alternative and was too low to bale out. I was going to need a lot of luck to pull it off. I only had, at the most, 300 yards of landing area and, because of the damage done to my elevators and port aileron it was virtually impossible to get any guidance from the stick and rudder. If I allowed the speed to drop too low I would stall, dive into the ground and almost certainly be killed. On the other hand if I came in too fast, I would not be able to get the aircraft to stall and would fly straight into the houses at the far end. Because my instruments had all gone, the only way I had of making that vital assessment was visually, by watching the ground passing beneath me.

Crabbing my way along to keep the smoke away from my forward line of sight, I glided down towards the houses which lined the near side of my landing area. Passing a few feet above their roofs, I flung the Spitfire into a steep sideslip to drop off height. In order to cut down my landing run, I had left the wheels retracted in the wings. Now leveling off above the vegetables, I started to kick the rudder right and left so as to drop off speed.

About two thirds of the way across the field I realised I was going too fast and wasn't going to make it. Emergency action was needed, otherwise I was going to end up in the drawing room of the red brick house which was rushing towards me.

I muttered a quick prayer and took the only course open. Flinging the stick over to the left, I drove the port wing tip into the ground. There was a grinding noise as the wing dug into the soil and then I was cartwheeling.
Landing on it's belly, facing back the way we came, the aircraft was now slithering backwards. The tail struck a hedge dividing the field from the small garden of a house in a cloud of dust and branches, we came to a juddering halt. There was a sudden and complete silence - one of the most welcome I have ever known.

As I heaved myself from the cockpit, a lady appeared through the gate from the garden. In her hand she bore a mug. 'Are you all right dear?' she cried. 'I thought you might like a cup of tea to steady your nerves.'

[FOZ_1983]

Great stuff mate, its good to read the accounts they leave.

Even better to see all the cups of tea we must of drank, makes me proud to be British haha.