At a few minutes after seven in the morning of Tuesday, 13 August 1940, Brian Binyon, a controller with the Bromley Observer Corps, spoke calmly into his field telephone as he reported what he was seeing: “Raid 45 is bombing Eastchurch drome.” Binyon watched as the fifty+ bomb aimers of Luftwaffe Bomber Group 2 delivered their bombloads on the RAF airfield. Across the field, in the Non-commissioned Officers’ quarters, Sgt. Reg Gretton of 266 Squadron, recovered from momentary shock and yelled: “They’re dropping bombs! They’re dropping bombs on us!” The more pragmatic commanding officer: Group Captain Frank Hopps reacted more analytically: “My God, this station’s worth millions. Some accountant’s got a job to do writing off this lot.”
Oberst Johannes Fink, the German air leader in command of this early morning attack on the airfields of Fighter Command, was pleased and impressed with what his group was achieving this morning. To that point, twelve parked Spitfires that had been on overnight transit to RAF Hornchurch in Essex, had been destroyed, along with five Bristol Blenheim light bombers. The Germans had also left the Operations Block severely damaged with all electrical and telephone lines cut, and nearby petrol supplies destroyed.
The surprise felt by Sgt Gretton and Group Captain Hopps was rooted in the fact that Eastchurch was in no way connected with Fighter Command or its airfields. It was a Coastal Command field, whose squadrons were responsible for patrolling the North Sea in search of German naval raiders, an unlikely target for enemy bombers set on laying the groundwork for the invasion of England.
Having shifted their attention from bombing the British coastal shipping, the Germans were now concentrating their considerable efforts on the task of destroying the Royal Air Force, initially its airfields and specifically, those of Fighter Command. In the late afternoon of the 13th, eighty-six Stuka divebombers broke up the tea break of the airmen at RAF Detling near Maidstone, Kent. In the attack the main runway was cratered, the hangars were set alight, the Ops Block demolished and upwards of twenty aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Devastatingly, some fifty personnel were killed. The base was out of operation for a day in yet another example of Luftwaffe intelligence and planning seemingly gone astray, for Detling, like Eastchurch, was a Coastal Command air station and nothing to do with Fighter Command.
But these attacks, and the largely ineffectual earlier raids on the radar stations of the RAF, were soon overshadowed by such recent raids as that of Luftwaffe Test Group 210 on the important Fighter Command fon/vard airfield at Manston. The Germans struck the base, code-named Charlie Three, with a large combined force of bombed-up Me I I Os and Me 109s under the command of Hauptmann Walter Rubensdörffer His fighters arrived in time to catch the Spitfires of 65 Squadron struggling to get into the air from the Manston drome as they ta×iied blindly through the thick, choking smoke of the many explosions. Flight Lieutenant Al Deere, in the lead of 54 Squadron, recalled being over the Manston base during the attack:”… there was a cloud like white pumice rising over the drome … it was like a shroud over everything.” What Deere was seeing was chalk dust blown up from more than a hundred bomb craters. The same sight greeted Flying Officer Wilfred Duncan Smith, father of the current British government Work and Pensions Secretary, lain Duncan Smith, when he arrived in the Manston area after returning in a Tiger Moth biplane from leave.
The Manston base was an all-grass airfield built in 1916 during the First World War In many ways, in 1940 the station was still operating as it had in the First War period, by the book and keeping largely peace-time hours. On one occasion, some pilots of 32 Squadron were refused transport to the mess when they couldn’t produce a signed Form 658, so they appropriated a tractor at gunpoint and, on arriving at the building, discovered that the chef had already left for home, having locked up the food larder. The squadron’s John Worrall: “I shot the lock off the larder and we ate.”
above: Airmen of the Royal Air Force being given physical training in their preparation to become new pilots; below: The pilot of Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bomber bringing his bombload to Britain during the Blitz period in early 1941.
A lot of Manston personnel were, perhaps, more nervous about the bombing raid than those of other RAF fighter stations receiving similar Luftwaffe attention that week. At Manston, many of the ground personnel, when the raid struck, headed rapidly for the warren of deep chalk caves that wound beneath the aerodrome. Hundreds of base workers holed up in the catacombs for days, despite the efforts of their officers to dislodge them.
As the German fighter leader Adolf Galland recalled: “The enemy air force must be wiped out while still grounded” as he considered the clinical elimination, airfield by airfield, of Fighter Command’s facilities. What was becoming clear, though, was that Abteilung 5, the Luftwaffe’s Intelligence arm, was not distinguishing between the airfields of Fighter Command and other military airfields in southern England, in its contributions to target selection. Many wondered about the logic of the target selection. Which of the Fighter Command airfields were of highest priority for attack, and when attacking them, which specific facilities mattered most as targets—the hangars and other buildings, or the aircraft on the ground?
Another forward fighter base came under Luftwaffe attack on 12 August. RAF Hawkinge near Folkstone, right on Kent’s coastal cliffs, was pounded by Junkers Ju 88 bombers and put out of action for the day. The field was hit again three days later by Stuka dive-bombers and effectively shut down for two further days. In that period, the Germans struck again at Eastchurch, and at the Short Brothers Aircraft factory at Rochester in Kent, another questionable target in that the Shorts plant there was producing four-engined Stirling bombers, rather than front-line defensive fighters, the supposed prime target of the Luftwaffe in its preparatory work towards the invasion plan. Other questionable raid targets in that brief span were the naval air stations at Lee-on-Solent, Ford, and Gosport, none of them with any Fighter Command connection.
Between 12 and 23 August, the second phase of the Battle of Britain was conducted when bombers and dive-bombers of the Luftwaffe, accompanied by large numbers of fighter escorts, targetted the key coastal and near-coast airfields of RAF Fighter Command in a major attempt to destroy the main defensive capability of the British air force and gain air superiority over Britain ahead of the planned German invasion.
top: A German aerial view of the RAF airfield at Biggin Hill, Kent, during the Battle of Britain; below: Pilot’s view from the cockpit of a Spitfire; bottom: Pilot Officer R.F.T. Doe who flew with Nos 234 and 238 Squadronsin the Battle of Britain and after; above: A Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire Mk 1 fighter which, together with its sister aircraft, the Hawker Hurricane, were the principal RAF fighter aircraft of the Battle of Britain period.
Gradually that week, the Luftwaffe seemed to get the measure of the target airfields they were trying to destroy. 15 August, though, saw the downing of seventy-five German aircraft in the course of their raids, a momentous achievement for Fighter Command in the midst of the punishing attacks on its airfields. On the 16th, however, the Germans were back in force to continue their visits to the fields of Fighter Command as two squadrons of Ju 88 bombers hit one of 11 Group’s most important sector stations, West Malling, Kent at about 11 :00 a.m. Within the hour, the Chain Home RDF system detected three large formations of aircraft heading towards the Thames Estuary. They would be met by upwards of eighty of Keith Park’s fighters which turned many of the bombers back to France. Almost simultaneously, a force of about 150 German planes crossed the south coast unopposed between Folkstone and Brighton. By the time fighter defenders reached the intruders, the Germans were bombing Farnborough and the London docks where, in the attack, sixty-six civilians were killed. By 12:45 p.m. Park had scrambled eight fighter squadrons to intercept a new formation of 150 enemy aircraft coming across from Cherbourg, consisting of many Stukas, Ju 88s, and escorting 109s. As the massive formation approached the Isle of Wight, it split into three elements. One headed for the Ventnor Chain Home station, a second for Gosport, and the last for RAF Tangmere. Given sufficient warning the Hurricanes of 43 and 601 Squadrons at Tangmere were scrambled to intercept the enemy force over the Solent. In about eight minutes of aerial combat, some of the estimated fifty to 100 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers turned back to their French bases, jettisoning their bombs as they fled. In the ensuing action, the large escorting force of Me 109 fighters took no part in the engagment. In the fight, which soon broke into a number of individual fights, 43 Squadron pilots Tony Woods Scawen was slightly wounded and was forced to crash-land at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, while Hamilton Upton had to force land on the beach at Selsey.
above: Stan Turner flew with No 242 (Canadian) Squadron, RAF in the Battle of Britain; top: Twenty-two-victory ace Wing Commander Robert Stanford Tuck flew Hurricanes with 257 Squadron and was later a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft Three.
As this air combat continued, the first wave of Stukas went on to strike in the first attack of the war on the airfield at Tangmere, near Chichester on the Sussex coast. Meanwhile, 601 Squadron, also out of Tangmere, was vectored over the Isle of Wight and told to climb to 20,000 feet. On the way they spotted the wave of Stukas headed inbound towards Tangmere. The 601 leader, Flight Lieutenant Archibald Hope, then disregarded the controller’s instructions and took the squadron down after the Stukas, which were now beginning the dive-bombing of the airfield. Pilots of 601 soon shot down three of the Stukas, but not before they had dropped their bombloads on the base. In the encounter with the Stukas, the Hurricane of American Pilot Officer Billy Fiske, flying with 601, was hit by gunfire from one of the German planes. The burning Hurricane was trailing glycol as Fiske managed to put it down on the airfield. Two nursing orderlies, Corporal George Jones and AC2 Cyril Faulkner quickly arrived in an ambulance to pull the injured Fiske from the wreck of his fighter and take him to the station sick quarters. Dr C.B.I. Willey: “I saw one of 601’s Hurricanes lying on its belly belching smoke after coming if for its final approach. There were two ambulance men there. They had got Billy Fiske out of the cockpit. They didn’t know how to take off his parachute so I showed them. Billy was burnt about the hands and ankles. I told him, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right…”
At that point, Dr Willey heard a warning over the station Tannoy: “Take cover! Take cover! Stukas sighted coming towards Tangmere. Take cover!” He got his twelve patients moved quickly to a bombproof shelter but was then injured himself when a bomb struck the sick quarters. Dr Willey carried on treating the wounded and seriously injured and, when Billy Fiske was brought in, he examined the pilot, who had been badly burnt from the waist down. Fiske was unconscious and the doctor gave him morphine. Within twenty minutes Fiske was taken to the Royal West Sussex Hospital in Chichester where he died the next day.
Westhampnett was a satellite airfield of Tangmere, also near Chichester There the Spitfire pilots of 602 Squadron were ordered into the air just before 1:00 p.m. to attack the Stukas at Tangmere. Findlay Boyd, a flight commander with the squadron, spotted and went after a Stuka that was climbing out after dropping its bombs on the airfield. He chased it and soon shot it down. Three other 602 pilots caught and downed Stukas departing from the attack. On the ground at Tangmere, 2nd Lt. E. P Griffin of the Royal Engineers Construction Company, manned a Lewis gun on the airfield and managed to shoot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 twin-engined heavy fighter which crashed nearly a mile from the drome, killing its three-man crew.
top and above: Photos representative of the Spitfire manufacturing process at the Vickers Castle Bromwich factory in Birmingham, England in 1942. At Castle Bromwich, and at many other aircraft manufacturing facilities across Britain in the Second World War, women played a vital part in advancing the quantity and quality production of the superb fighters and other aircraft for the pilots and aircrews of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy in the war years. below: Cockpit layout installation.
above: Inspection of a nearly completed Spitfire on the Castle Bromwich assembly line in 1942; below: Finished Spitfires awaiting pre-delivery test flights. At Castle Bromwich, chief test pilot Alex Henshaw probably flew more Spitfires than anyone in the history of the remarkable plane; bottom: RAF Fighter Command pilots put some muscle into pushing a new Spitfire at their fighter station dispersal in 1942.
The twenty-minute German bombing attack on Tangmere had begun at 1:00 p.m. Destroyed in the raid were all of the pre-war hangars, the station workshops, the water-pumping station and stores. Badly damaged were the Officers’ Mess, and the power, water, sanitation and communications systems. Seven Hurricanes, six Blenheims, and a Magister aircraft were destroyed on the ground, along with forty vehicles. In the raid, twenty-five German aircraft were brought down. Ten Tangmere station personnel were killed and twenty injured.
At lunchtime on 18 August, thirty-one Dorniers of Oberstleutnant Fröhlich’s Bomber Group 76 had been sent to strafe the Fighter Command sector stations at Biggin Hill in Kent, and Kenley in Surrey As a diversionary tactic, the Luftwaffe had also sent five Dorniers in at low level to confuse the radar stations. It immediately became a split-second decision for the Kenley controller, Anthony Norman; though the Observer Corps had sighted the low-level Dorniers as they approached the white chalk quarry that pointed to Kenley. 11 Group had not ordered a scramble, so Norman acted on his own. “Get them into their battle bowlers … tin hats everybody,” he ordered the floor supervisor To Squadron Leader Aeneas MacDonnell’s 64 Squadron he ordered: “Freema Squadron, scramble. Patrol base, angels twenty.”
High over Kenley, MacDonnell suddenly told his pilots, “Freema Squadron, going down.” One of them, Sgt. Peter Hawke recalled: “Why down? We need all the height we can get.” Then he saw the black smoke column pulsing up from the Kenley hangars. The low-level raid had come in ahead of the attackers. Seeing a flash like exploding helium from a Dornier Hawke thought, “My God! Did I do that? Well, this was what I was trained to do.”
Just over the airfield, Hurricanes of 111 Squadron were arriving from Croydon, but no one had warned them that the station defences were firing parachute-and-cable rockets at the German raiders. The electrically-fired rockets were snaking upwards at forty feet a second to grapple the enemy wings with steel wire. “If one of those hits us we’re finished,” thought the 111 commander Squadron Leader John Thompson.
In the attack, Bomber Group 76 lost six Dornier bombers and crews and four Ju 88 bombers. It had smashed ten hangars and damaged six more; put the Ops Room out of action, and crumbled many more buildings. Fortunately for Kenley, many of the enemy bombs failed to explode.
Group Captain Richard Grice at Biggin Hill down the road from Kenley knew how lucky Biggin had been when its turn for the attentions of the Luftwaffe had come. Most of the 500 or so bombs that fell on his airfield had landed wide, out on the eastern end of the field. Still, he warned the station personnel: “What happened to Kenley today can well happen here, so don’t think that you’ve escaped.”
At Fighter Command, Dowding’s former personal assistant, Pilot Officer Robert Wright remembered wondering: “Did the Germans plan to concentrate the might of their bombers against the sector stations? German General Paul Deichmann, Chief of Staff of the 2nd Flying Corps, later recorded: “That fear was groundless. Never at any time did the Luftwaffe High Command suspect that Kenley and Biggin Hill—or, for that matter, Hornchurch, Tangmere, and Middle Wallop—were sector stations, the nerve centres of Dowding’s command. We all thought priority comnmand posts would be sited underground, away from the centre of operations, not in unprotected buildings in the centre of the airfields. And not all of them had sandbags or blast walls!”
By 24 August all efforts to hold Manston had proved in vain. As twenty Ju 87 dive-bombers with fighter escort swept in over the field, Pilot Officer Henry Jacobs was relaying a blow-by-blow commentary to HQ 11 Group, when he heard a hollow note like a gong going up the wire; a bomb, striking the telephone and teleprinter links, had severed 248 circuits in one blow. Running from 600 Squadron’s Ops Room, Jacobs saw that the East Camp guard house had disappeared, swallowed into a chalky crater forty feet deep. All the Manston buildings still standing were burning. That same day most of the station personnel were moved out. Already civilians were moving in to loot tools and live ammunition from the main store.
Interviewed at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, former Luftwaffe chief Her mann Goering: “I believe this plan [raiding RAF airfields and British aircraft factories] would have been very successful, but as a result of the Fuehrer’s speech about retribution, in which he asked that London be attacked immediately, I had to follow the other course. I wanted to interpret the Fuehrer’s speech about attacking London in this way. I wanted to attack the airfields first, thus creating a prerequisite for attacking London … I spoke to the Fuehrer about my plans in order to try to have him agree I should attack the first ring of RAF airfields around London, but he insisted he wanted to have London itself attacked for political reasons, and also for retribution. I considered the attacks on London useless and I told the Fuehrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British.”
The famous pilot’s signature board from the White Hart pub, Brasted, near RAF Biggin Hill in Kent.