Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Author:Alan Allport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile EBooks
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

MARGINS

‘We crossed the Thames and the Medway, leaving the towns with their moorings of toy balloons far beneath.’ It was the morning on 28 August 1940, and Jim Bailey was a twenty-year-old Pilot Officer in RAF Fighter Command’s 264 (Madras Presidency) Squadron, taking part in his first combat action. Twelve of 264’s aircraft had been scrambled from the RAF base at Hornchurch in Essex to intercept a group of German bombers – several dozen Heinkel He 111s – detected heading northwards across the Channel from Calais. It was fifteen days since the Luftwaffe had begun its full-scale, systematic daylight raiding of south-eastern England, attacking RAF airfields in a bid to wear down Fighter Command’s defences and so achieve local air superiority over Kent and Sussex – perhaps as a prelude to a ground invasion. Two days earlier, twenty-seven of the RAF’s fighters had been destroyed and six pilots killed in massive aerial battles over the Home Counties. German losses were greater still, but they had had larger numbers to begin with. The strain on Fighter Command’s young airmen was beginning to tell. The outcome of this battle – the ‘Battle of Britain’, as Churchill had already named it back in July – seemed very much in the balance.

In the distance, Bailey could see a drove of Heinkels approaching from the south-east, accompanied by dusty splatters of anti-aircraft fire. Far above them, ‘small black motes in the empyrean’, were the German Bf 109 escort fighters, buzzing about sinisterly. Bailey’s orders were to ignore them and to stay rigidly in formation to attack the bombers, trusting that other nearby British fighters would deal with the Luftwaffe escorts. ‘Then it happened’, he said:

They were about twenty or thirty large Heinkels flying in sections of three, line astern. My gunner began to fire. I concentrated on keeping formation, confident that the whole of ‘B’ Flight was behind, protecting my tail. The four Brownings stuttered above my head. I became excited […] the Heinkels looked as big as elephants.

I had felt jolts or rattles on my own aircraft, and a voice seemed to be saying down the intercom, ‘I’m wounded.’ I flicked over, pulled back on the stick, and spiralled for the ground in a controlled blackout. At ground level I straightened out.

‘Are you all right?’ I shouted to the air-gunner down our faulty radio. ‘Quite all right.’ ‘I thought you said you were wounded?’ ‘No!’ he said. ‘Turn to starboard.’ Then the engine died.

With the throttle not responding and only a couple of hundred feet of altitude left between his aircraft and the soil of Kent, Bailey had no choice but to look for an emergency landing site. All the fields below were studded with wooden poles, planted earlier in the summer to thwart German invasion gliders. With all other options exhausted, Bailey brought his aircraft down hard into a hedgerow, just missing some overhanging high-tension cables as he plummeted to a halt. He bloodied his nose on the instrument panel at the moment of collision, but he was otherwise unhurt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.