Inferno - Max Hastings [59]
Many of the RAF’s young fliers, knowing the rate of attrition Fighter Command was suffering, accounted themselves dead men, though this did not diminish their commitment. Hurricane pilot George Barclay’s 249 Squadron was posted to one of the most embattled stations, North Weald, in Essex, on 1 September. A comrade said bleakly as they packed for the move, “I suppose some of us here will never return to Boscombe.” Barclay himself took a slightly more optimistic view, writing in his diary: “I think everyone is quite sure he will survive for at least seven days!”
At the end of August, the Germans made their worst strategic mistake of the campaign: they shifted their objectives from airfields first to London, then to other major cities. Hitler’s air commanders believed this would force Dowding to commit his last reserves, but Britain’s leaders, from Churchill downwards, were vastly relieved. They knew the capital could absorb enormous punishment, while Fighter Command’s installations were vulnerable. The men in the air saw only relentless combat, relentless losses. George Barclay wrote to his sister on 3 September in the breathless, adolescent style characteristic of his tribe: “We have been up four times today and twice had terrific battles with hundreds of Messerschmitts. It is all perfectly amazing, quite unlike anything else … One forgets entirely what attitude one’s aeroplane is in, in an effort to keep the sights on the enemy. And all this milling around of hundreds of aeroplanes, mostly with black crosses on, goes on at say 20,000ft with the Thames estuary and surrounding country as far as Clacton displayed like a map below.”
Sandy Johnstone “nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit” on getting his first glimpse of the massed Luftwaffe assault of 7 September. “Ahead and above a veritable armada of German aircraft … Staffel after staffel as far as the eye could see … I have never seen so many aircraft in the air all at one time. It was awe-inspiring.” At the outset, German airmen derived comfort from flying amid a vast formation. “Wherever one looks are our aircraft, all around, a marvellous sight,” wrote Peter Stahl, flying a Junkers Ju-88 on one of the September mass raids. But he and his comrades quickly learned that security of mass was illusory, as formations were rent asunder by diving, banking, shooting Hurricanes and Spitfires. By late afternoon of the seventh, a thousand planes were locked in battle over Kent and Essex. Seconds later, George Barclay’s Hurricane was hit and he was obliged to crash-land in a field. The Germans lost forty-one aircraft on 7 September, while Fighter Command lost twenty-three. As in all the battle’s big clashes, the British had the best of the day.
Ulrich Steinhilper, flying a Bf-109, was one of many pilots who, between spasms of intense fear and excitement, was struck by the beauty of the spectacle they created: over London one September day, he gloried in “the pure azure-blue of the sky, with the sun dimmed by the sinister smoke penetrating to extreme height; this interwoven and cross-hatched by the con trails of fighters locked in their life-and-death struggles. In among this, the burning balloons and the few parachutes in splendid and incongruous isolation.” The Luftwaffe’s 15 September onslaught was unaccompanied by the usual feints and diversions, so that Fighter Command was in no doubt about the focus of the threat, and could