The Secret Life of Fighter Command by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay [McKay, Sinclair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI

The Prime Minister wishes it to be known that the possibility of German attempts at invasion has by no means passed away. The fact that the Germans are now putting about rumours that they do not intend an invasion should be regarded with a double dose of the suspicion which attaches to all their utterances. Our sense of growing strength and preparedness must not lead to the slightest relaxation of vigilance or moral alertness.

In the more northerly areas of the country, a frenetic training programme for novice fighter pilots was under way. ‘We watched an exhilarating mock battle,’ wrote one reporter, not disclosing the name of the village or the county, ‘delivered by a flight of Spitfires against Blenheims in the guise of enemy bombers. These fighter pilots are in a state of eager readiness to engage the enemy, and we saw what the concentrated power of their eight machine guns means when an aircraft discharged a few sharp bursts, at a rate of 160 rounds a second.’ But in some eastern coastal areas, pilots were not so much eager as, in some cases, salivating to fight. Douglas Bader, for instance, with 12 Group at Duxford, was later to give strident voice to what some significant higher figures were saying: that Dowding was getting the tactics wrong, and that if they weren’t changed, the Germans would land.

There was sometimes an acute cruelty about the fates of the fighters. The flamboyant American William Fiske, based at Tangmere, had spent that summer on the attack, even on one occasion forcing a German plane into a barrage balloon. On 14 August 1940, his Hurricane was hit. Despite the flames, the choking smoke, he somehow managed to guide the plane in back to base. Yet he had not reached safety. His cockpit was now glowing red with fire; the efforts of the ground crew to pull him out were Herculean – he was caught in parachute paraphernalia. For a moment, it must have seemed as though he and his team had triumphed. One observer noted that Fiske was burnt around the hands and the ankles. They managed to lift him out of the plane. But the entire effort had been too much for his system. He died, as one observer put it, ‘of shock’. Fiske was twenty-nine years old.

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