The legion of lads who forged a new Britain

Last week we marked 75 years since the Battle of Britain’s “Hardest Day”, when the RAF and the Luftwaffe suffered unparalleled losses. Next month the skies over Britain will fill with Spitfires once more as part of a commemorative air show at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, in Cambridgeshire.

The Battle of Britain and the men who fought it passed into legend with extraordinary speed. In 1942 plans were announced for a Battle of Britain chapel in Westminster Abbey, the first of many national monuments. The following year, on the third anniversary of the victory, the King led a service of thanksgiving, a tradition that continues to this day. It was, above all, a homage to “the Few,” as Winston Churchill brilliantly tagged the airmen.

The service marked another historical first. Until then the credit for famous victories had always gone to commanders: Trafalgar belonged to Nelson and Waterloo to Wellington. This time the glory went to a group. Significantly, its members were not drawn exclusively from a traditional military elite. They came from every stratum of Britain’s laminated class structure — “ordinary people doing extraordinary things” as the propaganda of the time emphasised. It was, by and large, the truth.

This anniversary should also remind us that in some ways the Battle of Britain can be seen as a social as well as a military turning point in our history, when the egalitarian ethos of the Few set the tone for the sort of Britain its citizens wanted to see when the fighting was over.

In the summer of 1940 the pilots of Fighter Command were the nation’s darlings. People spoke of them with proprietorial affection. They were “the Fighter Boys” — a term that reflected the fact that they had an average age of 20 and many were still too young to vote. Newspapers and the BBC found them fascinating, and the authorities were only too eager to assist with interviews and photo opportunities.

Group Captain Dick Grice had a Tannoy speaker on his car so he could order drinks as he approached his favourite pub (Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty)

The young aviators played their earnest inquisitors like violins, conveying just the right mixture of boyish exuberance and strength of purpose. “These flying men are certainly giving us a new angle on the old Jekyll and Hyde story,” enthused Charles Graves of the Daily Mail. “They dance and flirt like American college boys. They even look like freshmen but if you talk to them about their job you will find that they are so full of tough common sense that, compared with them, the hardest-headed businessman seems like a sentimental debutante.”

The coverage created an impression of modernity and competence, which was exactly what the political and military establishment, fearing indictment for their lack of preparedness, wanted.

The difficult circumstances of the RAF’s birth meant that its prewar identity was somewhat confused. A hostile army and navy saw no point in an independent air service and strained to appropriate the upstart’s assets. To survive, it had to put down roots fast. One way was to create instant traditions and institutions that gave an impression of permanence.

The most striking example is the RAF cadet college at Cranwell, in Lincolnshire. The main building, opened in 1934, is inspired by the Royal Hospital Chelsea. But the handsome stone and brick elevations are pure facade. The whole thing is held up by thoroughly modern steel girders — an apt metaphor for the RAF of the time.

The experience of the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War had proved that you did not have to be a gentleman to be an outstanding officer. Three of the most prominent aces — Edward “Mick” Mannock, Albert Ball and James McCudden — came from humble backgrounds.

Nonetheless, Cranwell was devised as the RAF’s version of Sandhurst, where well-born young men whose parents could afford the fees were forged into leadership material. The technical nature of the new service, though, meant that the net had to be spread wider than the military’s traditional recruiting base — for officers and men alike.

Pilots and their planes during the Battle of Britain (Everett/Rex Shutterstock)

In 1936, with another war looming, the doors to the magical world of flying were thrown open when the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) was formed to provide a pool of trained pilots to replace the professionals who were expected to fall in the first phase of combat. The qualifications were modest, and suddenly the dreams of a legion of lower-middle-class lads brought up on Biggles came true as they set off at weekends to learn to fly at government expense.

“I’d always wanted to fly, from when I was a small boy,” remembered Charlton Haw, who left school at 14. “I never wanted to do anything else, really, but I never thought there would ever be a chance for me. Until the RAFVR was formed, for a normal schoolboy it was almost impossible.” He joined up in York, aged 18, went solo in half the average time and flew Hurricanes with 504 Squadron.

The reservists joined their squadrons as sergeant pilots, and as such would make an essential contribution to the victory. More than a third of the 2,946 men who flew in the Battle of Britain were NCOs. Much has been made of the apparent unfairness of a system by which men who fought and died together in the air should eat in different messes on the ground. In my conversations with survivors over the years I have rarely heard any complaints.

“We were all very close,” said Maurice Leng, who flew as a sergeant with 73 Squadron. “There was no sort of officers v sergeants ballyhoo. We were all in the same boat and there was marvellous camaraderie.”

By the later stages of the battle, death and injury had done much to dissolve the divide between the prewar establishment and the reservists. Almost every NCO pilot ended up with a commission, and the amateurs soon proved they were the equal of the professionals.

Two of the top three aces in the battle, Eric Lock and James “Ginger” Lacey, started off in the RAFVR, and the Battle of Britain veteran who went on to rise highest in the postwar service, Marshal of the RAF Lord Cameron, began his career as a sergeant pilot.

The Few were bound together by an ethos that could shrink social differences. They were drawn to the RAF because they were fascinated by flying — still a glamorous and mysterious activity — by a willingness to take risk and by an eagerness for fun and adventure.

While researching my latest book, Air Force Blue, a study of the RAF in the Second World War, I was struck again by how closely the popular image of them in many respects matches the reality. “We were young and had great confidence in our abilities and in our planes, so we all, quite joyfully, joined in the absurd race to death and destruction,” recalled Charles Fenwick, who flew with 610 Squadron.

The pilots constructed their own reality, in which the possibility of extinction, though ever present, was rarely mentioned and the hours not spent at readiness or in combat were to be lived to the full, for who knew how many more of them there would be? This generated some wild stories that needed little embellishment as they did the rounds of anteroom and pub.

A favourite concerns Tim Vigors, a colourful character even by the exacting standards of Fighter Command. One summer evening while stationed with 222 Squadron at Kirton in Lindsey, Lincolnshire, he set off in his Ford 8 for Lincoln with a Waaf (member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) from the control room at his side and his beloved lurcher Snipe in the back. Dinner was followed by drinks in a pub, where he ran into some RAF colleagues and “got seriously stuck into the beer”.

Vigors prided himself on his ability to stop drinking before his capacity to walk or drive was impaired but on this occasion his gift failed him and he was reduced to straddling the white line in the middle of the road all the way back to the base.

Once in his quarters he put on bright red pyjamas and collapsed. He was fighting an attack of “bedspin” when the loudspeaker outside his room blared, calling for pilots to report for duty. Vigors “staggered off the bed, slipped into my green silk dressing gown, donned my flying boots and weaved my way back to the car”. Reaching his Spitfire, he was told that a large number of enemy raiders had just crossed the coast. Vigors took off and waited for control to vector him onto the targets. Nothing happened. The radio was dead.

He turned back and while swinging round saw the silhouettes of two German bombers crossing the moon. He lined up behind one and opened fire. Soon its port engine was belching smoke and it was plunging earthwards. He had shot down a Heinkel He 111 in the dark, quite a feat even for someone sober.

Elation died as he realised he was now hopelessly lost and flying above a thick layer of cloud. Just when he was thinking he might have to bale out he spotted what seemed to be a flare path and managed to land at a grass airfield he knew from his days as a Cranwell cadet. The first person to greet him was one of his old instructors, who took his pyjama-clad protégé off for a drink.

Drinking was an intrinsic part of life, mostly the tangy bitter of the county breweries served in dimpled mugs and pewter tankards, up to eight pints a night. At the end of a long day’s fighting the pilots of Biggin Hill would jump into their jalopies and head through the ragged green lanes and ripening cornfields to their favourite pub, the White Hart at Brasted, in Kent.

Often the station commander, Group Captain Dick Grice, would lead the charge. “Dick Grice had a Tannoy speaker mounted on his car and you could hear him a mile away,” remembered Pete Brothers, a flight lieutenant with 32 Squadron. ‘This is the CO and I want three scotches and two pints of bitter.’ He’d got a bunch of chaps in the car and was calling up the bar.”

As the battle gathered pace, women did not feature much in the airmen’s lives. There was no time, and many took the view that it was not fair to tangle emotions when you might be dead tomorrow. Today the fun seems charmingly innocent. Many of those fighting were barely out of adolescence and sound more like boys than warriors in their letters.

“Dear Mum and Dad,” wrote the 19-year-old Pilot Officer John Carpenter, of 222 Squadron, on August 29, just before the unit moved base to Hornchurch and into the thick of the fighting. “I am writing this at five in the morning, we are leaving at eight and should be there by nine. I hope to be shooting Jerries down by ten.”

Three days later they received an update: “Sorry I have not written in the last twenty-four hours but my time has been rather occupied. So far I have one Messerschmitt 109 and one 110 to my credit, but in getting the 110 was shot down and had to bale out. Getting lots of fun here — just what we have been waiting for.”

The next letter was from hospital in Maidstone, where he was recovering after being downed again, this time by friendly anti-aircraft fire. He signs off by remarking that he is now eligible for the Caterpillar Club, founded by the manufacturer of the Irvin silk parachute, which awarded a lapel pin to all who made an emergency descent. “[In fact] I shall get the caterpillar and bar,” he wrote.

Carpenter’s letters display all the qualities that came to be associated with the Few: modesty, cheerfulness, understatement. Experiences that nowadays would be deemed to merit a book are passed over in a few casual phrases.

The airmen believed that they were doing no more than their job and were touchingly surprised at the reception they got from the public. On September 18 Sergeant Ian Hutchinson’s Spitfire was hit over Canterbury and he baled out. He was taken to hospital, where his shrapnel wounds were bandaged up, and as there was no transport he had to make his own way back to Hornchurch by rail. “I had to change trains somewhere,” he recalled. “I was standing on the station with a bandage on my leg and I’d lost my shoe and I was carrying a parachute under my arm and everyone was coming up and shaking my hand and I wished the ground would have opened up and swallowed me.”

It seems possible that those shaking hands with the young Glaswegian were doing something more than thanking him. They wanted to identify with him and show their solidarity. Everyone was in this battle together and those on the ground were demonstrating the same stoicism, selflessness and resolve as those in the air.

It was an attitude that made a return to the prewar order of social injustice and class privilege unthinkable. The memory of those days and the example of the airmen would find political expression when the shooting finally stopped and the country set about remaking itself.

Chocks away, it’s Spitfire heaven

On September 19 and 20 an air show at the Imperial War Museum Duxford, in Cambridgeshire, will mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

The flying display, between 2pm and 5.30pm on both days, will tell the story of Duxford’s pivotal role in the aerial battle. Twenty Spitfires will take off from the historic airfield, flying in mass formation.

Patrick Bishop is the author of Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, both published by HarperCollins. Air Force Blue will be published in 2017