Squadrons Up!: A Firsthand Story of the R.A.F.

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SQUADRONS UP!

A FIRSTHAND STORY OF THE R.A.F.

BY

NOEL MONKS

WAR CORRESPONDENT, LONDON DAILY MAIL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

In Memoriam 6

Acknowledgments 7

CHAPTER I—Cobber Kain and the A.A.S.F. 8

CHAPTER II—Squadron 73 18

CHAPTER III—The Prisoner of Luxemburg 29

CHAPTER IV—Blitz Days 42

CHAPTER V—Reims: Spree Town 57

CHAPTER VI—No. 1 Squadron 69

CHAPTER VII—Leo the Lion 80

CHAPTER VIII—The Epic of Maastricht Bridge 90

CHAPTER IX—England 104

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 115

In Memoriam

To Flying Officer E. J. (Cobber) Kain, D.F.C., Royal Air Force, of New Zealand, accidentally killed on active service, France, June 7, 1940, at the age of twenty-two. His courage, his fighting heart, and his life were at Britain’s service. His friendship was mine.

Acknowledgments

The Personnel, Nos. 1 and 73 Fighter Squadrons, Royal Air Force

The Daily Mail

The Air Ministry

The Ministry of Information

CHAPTER I—Cobber Kain and the A.A.S.F.

IT IS Friday, June 7, 1940. On a dusty emergency aerodrome near Blois in France a two-seater Magister communication plane is being loaded up with kit by an orderly. A tin helmet and a gas mask complete the loading, and the orderly reports to a group of young pilots wearing the uniform of the Royal Air Force, chatting gaily a few yards away.

Gear aboard. Good luck, sir.

A tall, broad-shouldered, black-haired flying officer with the ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross newly sewn underneath his wings leaves the group and walks to the waiting plane. He calls, Cheerio, chaps. Be good, to his colleagues and climbs into the cockpit, settles himself, gives a mechanic the thumbs-up. The engine roars.

Suddenly a mischievous grin spreads over the face of the young giant in the Magister. Over to the port side of him he has caught sight of a Hurricane fighter. It is his old ship. Only yesterday, 20,000 feet over Reims, he had squeezed the teat that controls eight machine guns, and down had gone his twenty-fifth Nazi.

So he uncurls his long legs from the cockpit of the Magister, goes over to the Hurricane, and wedges himself into the cockpit.

One more beat-up, me lads, he calls, and he is off across the bumpy drome in a cloud of hot dust.

The Magister’s engine is left ticking over nicely.

With a roar like a thunderclap the Hurricane comes back over the drome, over the heads of the little group of officers. Only just over their heads, because it is barely 20 feet off the ground, is upside down, and traveling 360 miles an hour. The boys call this a beat-up.

Still upside down, the Hurricane shoots up to 1,500 feet in less than a minute, turns right side up, then starts a series of rolls earthward. That’s just to show how the young man in the Hurricane is feeling, rolling about in the thin air. The little Magister waiting below, with its engine ticking over nicely, is going to take him home to England for special duties.

Two rolls are completed. The group of R.A.F. officers suddenly stop laughing and chattering. One says anxiously, What the hell? as the Hurricane goes into a third roll, which his experienced eye can see will bring it mighty close to earth. Then three or four of them yell, Cobber, Cobber, and start running. There’s a crash. The Hurricane doesn’t quite complete the third roll. The port wing touches the ground....

While the young officers are lifting their dead comrade from the wreckage, a mechanic climbs into the cockpit of the Magister. He switches off the engine.

That’s how Flying Officer E. J. (Cobber) Kain, Fighter Squadron 73, Royal Air Force, died. He was the first ace in the war against Nazidom, and he was the last officer but one of that squadron’s original personnel that flew off so gaily to France in September, 1939, still to be on his feet in France on that June day.

Some were in hospital; others were back in England. One, accidentally killed, lay buried at Metz. But not one had been killed in action against the enemy. Two of the squadron’s non-commissioned-officer pilots had been killed in action, but they were avenged many times over. Nearly two hundred times over.

I start this story of the two fighter squadrons with Cobber Kain’s death because I am sure that is how every officer and man of the two squadrons would want it to start. Throughout his nine months’ life in France, Cobber Kain was as much toasted in the mess of No. 1 Squadron, billeted 20 miles away at Bar-le-Duc, as he was in the mess of his own Squadron 73. That’s the way they have in the Royal Air Force. The good a man does is for the good of the Service and not for himself alone. The fame that came to Cobber Kain, the legends that grew around him among the French people—and among the British—were as much part of No. 1 Squadron as they were of No. 73, just as the heroic deeds of the pilots of both these squadrons during those nine months brought glory and everlasting fame to the Royal Air Force. Because it was the boys of these two squadrons that first came to grips with the enemy, fighter against fighter, and so demonstrated early in the war that nothing that came out of Germany could match the Royal Air Force pilot in a British Hurricane, man for man, plane for plane. Only in numbers did the Nazis shine.

Trained to the minute, keyed up to a great pitch of excitement, the thirty odd officers and sixteen Sergeant Pilots of the two squadrons dropped down in September, 1939, on their allotted aerodromes in France. Not one of them had ever fired a shot in anger. Sons of rich men and poor men, their average age was twenty-one, and all they asked was to get at the enemy, bright and snappy. They were destined to wait quite a while. Fighter Squadrons 1 and 73 were part of the Advanced Air Striking Force under the command of Air Vice-Marshal P. H. L. Playfair, a man who had done more than his share of haring about the heavens in search of glory before these boys were born.

A bomber squadron of the Advanced Air Striking Force produced the first air Victoria Crosses in this war. Squadron 1 fought and defeated the first enemy fighter in the first fighter-versus-fighter combat on the Western Front. And No. 73 Squadron had Cobber Kain.

The calls made on R.A.F. pilots stationed in France from Blitzkrieg day (May 10) onward provided cases of individual heroism that, for courage, devotion to duty, and desperate initiative against supreme odds, will hardly be excelled.

Two fighter squadrons against the aerial might of Germany! A handful of bomber squadrons, setting off without escort into the teeth of the greatest system of aerial defenses the world has known.

The sky was always black with enemy machines. They presented a solid wall along the battle front through which our bombers had to plow their way to reach their objectives. At all heights, from 26,000 feet down to 1,000 feet, the enemy waited in layers, like vultures.

But some of our bombers got through on every raid.

And if the boys of Nos. 1 and 73 Squadrons ever had to fight on patrol at odds of less than five to one, they’d mumble, Nothing to report, when they dropped down to reload, refuel, and grab a sandwich.

For a month the flying personnel of the Advanced Air Striking Force hardly had their clothes off. They drove themselves on and on against the pressure of Göring's air force until they fell asleep where they sat or where they stood. When they awoke and were up in the sky again, there would be ten fresh Nazi machines to every one that had been shot down the day, the night, the hour, or the half hour before.

Boys of twenty became old men in four days of living like that. But even with their swollen, red eyes, the fighter boys were always seconds ahead of the Nazis in seeing danger—and meeting it. Their hearts and their sinews and their brains remained young. Out of the chaos of the heavens came the miracle of the Hurricanes. The lads of Squadrons 1 and 73 lost count of their enemy bags. Messerschmitt 109’s and 110’s, Dorniers, Heinkel 111’s, Junker 88’s spread their wings over the Western Front like hordes of locusts, but the British Hurricanes, always outnumbered, took their tally.

An hour after the Blitzkrieg started, the two fighter squadrons had moved in from Verdun and Bar-le-Duc to headquarters at Reims, where I was stationed.

Half an hour after they left, the Nazis came over and unloaded 1,000 bombs on their old dromes. For once Hitler had really missed the bus. Ground personnel had a nasty time but turned up at Reims cheerful and ready for work.

I remember driving out to the drome at Reims on the evening of May 11. The boys had had 24 hours of continuous battle. A dozen Hurricanes were being serviced, so there were only 24 Hurricanes against the Nazis! Twelve of these went up on patrol, sure of meeting the enemy. Twelve were on the ground, in reserve. Twelve!

The pilots were talking of an auxiliary squadron of fighters coming out, manned by weekend pilots. You’d have thought they were expecting 1,000 planes—it must have seemed like it to them. That auxiliary squadron came out. It shot down five enemy machines before breakfast on its first patrol.

Back in my hotel in Reims that night, May 11, I wrote in my diary: It’s nice having the fighter boys close by, instead of 100 miles away. I went to sleep with the sirens ringing in my ears. After all, there were twenty-four Hurricanes within a mile.

The days that followed were heartbreaking ones for us onlookers. We had made many close friends among the young heroes of Squadrons 1 and 73. It didn’t seem possible that they could survive.

But although these fliers were shot down over and over again, they were soon back in the air, often only a few hours afterward, and fought right through a month of the greatest shambles in history.

Only two officer pilots, believed killed in action, were missing, in the two fighter squadrons during their nine months in France. They came from No. 1 Squadron. Both officers concerned sold themselves dearly, having accounted for twenty aircraft between them.

When France laid down her arms and Squadrons 1 and 73 flew back to England, out of the thirty officer pilots who had flown out to France nine months before, twenty-six were still alive and ready to carry on from home bases.

Over a span of 200 miles in France the wreckage of 100 German aircraft of all types lay strewn. They were the Hurricanes’ victims, the official bag of Squadrons 1 and 73. At least another 100 staggered toward their bases in Germany but never reached them. Probably thirty Hurricanes were wiped off in combat, forced landings, mishaps.

In the days before the Blitzkrieg, Goering sent every type of plane he had to test out the Hurricanes, Britain’s third best fighter aircraft. I saw the ruins of most of them, strung out around Verdun, Metz, Reims, and Bar-le-Duc, after Cobber Kain and his colleagues had met up with them.

The boys all had the same story to tell: I got him in my sights, squeezed the teat, and let him have it.

The teat was the electric button that, when pressed, fired bullets from eight machine guns at the rate of 9,600 a minute.

It must have been a bitter pill to the Nazi air chiefs that the best they had in fighters and bombers were easy money for Hurricanes. As a coating to that pill, however, they had the knowledge of a three-to-one numerical superiority.

The pilots of Nos. 1 and 73 Squadrons had the eyes of the world on them when they touched down on their roughly surveyed aerodromes in France. Their beat was to be the Western Front. They were to be the first British fighter pilots to start the ball rolling in the battle for aerial supremacy against the Nazis.

The Italian Air Force had had a walkover in Abyssinia, though it boasted a Death or Glory Squadron. German pilots had had things pretty much their own way in Spain, what with the bombing of defenseless towns like Guernica and shooting up Spanish government pilots who were flying tomato crates. The British fighter pilot of 1939-1940 was an unknown quantity.

Today, more than a year after hostilities began for the British, the facts about the Royal Air Force are known.

The Royal Air Force fighter pilot, whether he is in a Spitfire, a Defiant, a Hurricane, or a tomato crate, has no peer in the present arena.

In theory, the boys of Squadrons 1 and 73 knew quite a bit about fighting tactics. It played a big part in their training. Also, they knew all about the air battles of 1914-1918. But in this war they had to evolve a new strategy, a new technique. They became wizards of cunning, daring, and gallantry.

No man had ever fought an aerial battle at 24,000 feet before. No man had ever flown a machine at 360 miles an hour and fought a duel at the same time, fighter against fighter. The lusty young giants of Squadrons 1 and 73 had some pioneering to do.

They wrote new and glorious pages in Royal Air Force history.

In coolness and skill, any one of them would have made the World War ace Richthofen, Red Knight of Germany, look like a clay idol. Richthofen would have made a poor show in this war, not being able to sit up in the clouds and pick off lame ducks as they staggered out of a dogfight. Things happen too quickly for that sort of aerial warfare today.

The 1939-1940 fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force were just as much pioneers as were the gallant lads of the original Royal Flying Corps who chugged across the Channel at 90 miles an hour in 1914 with half a dozen flying hours in their logbooks. Twenty-five years had brought about as big a revolution in aviation as it had in motor cars, radio, motion pictures. Few, if any, of the officer personnel of Squadrons 1 and 73 had less than 200 flying hours in their logbooks. A man was an ace in the last war with 50 hours up. In this war he was yet untried with 200 hours.

The Hurricane boys had three years of stiff training behind them. And, they had the full-blooded traditions of the R.F.C.