Duel of Eagles: The Classic Account of the Battle of Britain by Peter Townsend

Author:Peter Townsend [Townsend, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silvertail Books
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Dunkirk over, the Germans thrust forward the very next morning with a crushing attack against the Somme defence line. The French Army’s hour was at hand. The flower of its fighting strength had been cut down in Flanders, and all but one division of the British Army had gone. The Armée de l’Air was almost done for and only a few RAF squadrons remained to fight alongside them.

At Debden we never even smelt the smoke of Dunkirk. 85 Squadron was non-operational. With a dozen boys not long out of school and about the same number of new Hurricanes, my job was to reform it into a fighting unit.

In Dicky Lee and Jeffries I had two fine flight commanders. Both had been branded in France and both had been lucky to escape – Jeffries was drinking coffee in an Abbeville cafe when he saw the Germans coming down the street. No one had ever ‘filé a l’anglaise’ quicker than he did. He soon went on to a Czech squadron and a Canadian named Hamilton took his place.

The new boys were a varied group – an air marshal’s son, a couple of undergraduates, an ex-insurance clerk, and among them two New Zealanders. They were boys of twenty and sometimes less with only ten hours’ Hurricane experience. This was the major problem. In a single-seater you have to do it all yourself. No one can help you. It had taken me years to gain what experience I had and even then my chances of survival were not high. Theirs were infinitely less.

The flight commanders and a few other pilots – Paddy Hemingway, James Marshall, Patrick Woods-Scawen, Sergeants Sammy Allard and Geoff Goodman were the most tested – helped me to provide a lively fund of experience on which the young ones could draw. They could barely fly a Hurricane – a highly dangerous machine in inexperienced hands, as was proved by the swift tragedy which overtook two of them.

All we could do was communicate our experience by touch, talk, and intuition and thus encourage the young ones to have faith in us and follow our examples. They had to learn through the mysterious, intuitive language of single-seater fighter pilots.

We taught them to search the sky, and watch their tails. They jousted with us in the sky to learn the tricks of air combat – above all never climb or dive in front of a Me. 109, but turn and turn again since it was there that the Hurricane outclassed the Me. 109. We led them up to Sutton Bridge to fire their guns. And as they progressed, I sent them out over the East Coast convoys to learn discipline, loyalty and vigilance.

Our superiors were encouraging. First our station commander Wing Commander Larry Fullergood, short of stature, energetic, and warm in his feelings towards us. We called him the Bulgarian General because we were endeared by his swarthy appearance and his real affection. He stood for us, and we loved him. Later he would write to me: ‘85 to my mind will always be the First Fighter Squadron of the RAF.

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