Air Force Blue by Patrick Bishop

Author:Patrick Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Kenneth Campbell VC (© Imperial War Museums, CH 4911)

Campbell, of course, was dead, along with his crew, Sergeants J. P. Scott, the Canadian navigator, R. W. Hillman, the wireless operator, and W. C. Mullins, the air gunner. As the pilot and captain, Campbell was awarded the Victoria Cross. The others, in keeping with the practice of the time, were deemed to have played no part in the decision to press home the attack and got nothing. Campbell was a twenty-three-year-old Scot, born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, educated at Sedburgh public school and Cambridge where he read chemistry and joined the University Air Squadron. What drove his extraordinary determination, what armoured him from the paralysing fear that the eruption of gunfire that met them must have provoked, we shall never know. In the photograph, from beneath his Air Force Blue side cap his steady eyes meet ours and tell us nothing.

The great Atlantic rendezvous of German surface ships never happened. In May, the attempted breakout by Bismarck came to a spectacular end when, after being battered by the shells and torpedoes of a combined naval task force, she went down 500 miles off Brest, with all flags flying. The episode provided some much-needed good news but also demonstrated that, used intelligently, combined air and sea operations could be devastatingly effective. Coastal played a crucial part in the battleship’s demise. It was a Spitfire from the command’s No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, which on 21 May took the pictures from which Bismarck and its consort, Prinz Eugen, were positively identified as they steamed towards Bergen.

The following day a Fleet Air Arm Maryland dipped below the clouds blanketing the Bergen fjords to establish that they had now departed. Both Coastal and FAA reconnaissance aircraft dogged the battleship’s steps as it passed through the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, and carried on the pursuit following the action of 24 May in which HMS Hood was sunk. When Bismarck shook off its shadowers on 26 May, it was a bold stroke by Frederick Bowhill that put them back on the trail. He ordered a patrol further south than the Admiralty reckoned the quarry to be. Coastal Command Catalina flying boats intercepted the battleship nearly 800 miles north-west of the haven of Brest and set in train the FAA Swordfish attack that slowed, and ultimately doomed, the battleship.

By now it was clear that the role allotted to Coastal Command at the outset was not ambitious enough. Its aircraft and crews would be better employed not just in reconnaissance and deterrent patrols but in an offensive role, hunting U-boats and destroying them.

The arrival of more and better aircraft and upgraded radar meant they were in a reasonable position to combine with the Navy to provide improved protection for the convoys and take the fight to the Germans.

Bowhill left in June 1941 to take over Ferry Command. On his watch, Coastal had undergone a quantitative and qualitative transformation. The nineteen squadrons it had started the war with had grown to forty.

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