Inferno - Max Hastings [57]
Fighter Command was acutely sensitive to the loss of its experienced pilots: ten Hurricane aces—men who had shot down five or more enemy planes—were lost between 8 and 19 August, then a further twelve between 20 August and 6 September. Novice replacements were killed at more than five times this rate; casualties were especially high in squadrons that continued to use the rigid formations RAF official doctrine prescribed for “Fighting Area Attacks.” Units fared better whose commanding officers promoted flexibility and initiative. Pilots who flew steady courses died; those who stayed alive dodged and weaved constantly, to render themselves elusive targets. Three-quarters of downed British fighters fell to Bf‑109s, rather than to bomber gunners or twin-engined Bf-110s. Surprise was all: four out of five victims never saw their attackers; many were hit from behind, while themselves attacking a plane ahead.
“People who stayed in a burning cockpit for ten seconds were overcome by the flames and heat,” said Sgt. Jack Perkin. “Nine seconds and you ended up in Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead in Dr. Archie McIndoe’s burns surgery for the rest of the war. If you got out in eight seconds you never flew again, but you went back about twelve times for plastic surgery.” Hurricane pilot Billy Drake described the experience of being shot down: “It was rather like having a motor-car accident. You can’t remember what the hell happened.” Both sides suffered heavily from non-combat mishaps, born of momentary carelessness or recklessness by tired and often inexperienced young men: between 10 July and 31 October, 463 Hurricanes suffered such damage, sometimes total and fatal. As many as one-third of both Dowding’s and Göring’s overall losses were accidental.
Few pilots who bailed out offshore were recovered: a man in a dinghy looked pathetically small to rescue-launch crews scouring the Channel and North Sea. Ulrich Steinhilper gazed below as he flew back over the Channel from a September mission: “Our track across those wild waters became dotted with parachutes, pilots floating in their lifejackets, and greasy oil slicks on the cold water showing where another Me109 had ended its last dive. All along the coast near Boulogne we had seen 109s down in the fields and on the grass, some still standing on their noses.” Nineteen German airmen drowned that day, while just two were picked up by floatplanes.
The chivalrous spirit with which the British, at least, began the battle faded fast. David Crook returned from a sortie in which his roommate had been killed, and found it strange to see the man’s possessions just where he had left them, towel hanging on the window. “I could not get out of my head the thought of Peter, with whom we had been talking and laughing that day. Now he was lying in the cockpit of his wrecked Spitfire at the bottom of the English Channel.” That afternoon, the dead pilot’s wife telephoned to arrange his leave, only to hear the flight commander break news of his death. Crook wrote: “It all seemed so awful. I was seeing at very close quarters all the distress that casualties cause.” After Pete Brothers’s squadron was engaged a few times and he had lost friends, he abandoned his earlier notions that they were playing a game between sporting rivals. “I then said, ‘Right, these are a bunch of bastards. I don’t like them any more. I am going to be beastly.’ ” Very early in the struggle, pilot Denis Wissler wrote in his diary: “Oh God I do wish this war would end.” But few of the young men who fought for either side in the Battle of Britain stayed alive through the five-year struggle that followed it. To fly was wonderful fun, but a profound and premature seriousness overtook most aerial