Dogfight (18 page)

Fortunately for Park, dawn the next day was marked by inclement weather, restricting the Luftwaffe to a handful of reconnaissance missions.

On 28 August, the Battle of Britain entered its most desperate period. Forty-four Fighter Command aircraft were rushed into the air a little after 8.00a.m. in response to a major build-up at the edge of British radar. A quarter of these defenders were the Defiants of 264 Squadron. In preparation for the day's operations, Emeny had carried out his unusual ritual of stowing nearly all his personal effects in the rear of the turret-fighter. A spate of thefts during an earlier operation had convinced the young New Zealander that the only way to safeguard his gear was to take it with him. Consequently, in the early hours of any operational day, Emeny could be seen religiously pushing all his uniforms, shirts and other sundry items into three sacks, which he subsequently secured with pieces of wire in the aircraft's rear fuselage. His pack-rat tendencies would save his life.

Upon crossing the coast, the Germans broke into two formations with one heading for the airfield at Eastchurch and the other for Rochford. With the covering Me 109s engaged by a formation of Hurricanes, the Defiants found themselves flying unmolested amid some 30 Rochford-bound Heinkels. Emeny's pilot pushed their machine through the formation, picking out a suitable target. Fifty feet separated Emeny from his prey when he noticed one of the German gunners ‘furiously bashing his jammed machine gun' in frustration. As the Anzac prepared to fire, a large undetected formation of Me 109s fell out of the sun on the turret-fighters. The Luftwaffe pilots immediately cut a swath through the unit.

Within moments they lost four machines and the New Zealander felt the explosion of a cannon shell across his face. Temporarily blinded by the flash and losing blood from shrapnel wounds to his cheek and nose, he heard the pilot yelling, ‘Bale out! Bale out!'[21] Not an easy order to follow, given the pilot was throwing the Defiant around violently and the turret was filling rapidly with smoke and angry licks of fire. Blood pooling in his mike prevented him alerting the pilot to the fact that the turret's rotating mechanism was mangled beyond repair. Blood-streaked and sweat-soaked, he eventually released the turret's lower hatch. The airflow extinguished the fire and cleared his steel and shattered Perspex nest of smoke. As he looked
down, he saw that the cannon shell's final resting place was one of the three sacks. ‘I ripped it out and we were safe again,' a relieved Emeny noted. ‘My personal belongings in those three sacks saved my life.' Had they not been there he might well have lost his legs. In the end he was not forced to bale out and, back at base, his wounds, though bloody, proved not to be life-threatening, though a piece of shrapnel that had tracked its way behind his eye had failed only by the narrowest of margins to sever the optic nerve. The squadron had been decimated with the loss of four shot down and a further trio of Defiants in need of significant repair. The game was up and the Defiants were finally withdrawn from the daylight campaign.

The Rochford heavy flak broke the back of the German pilots' resolve, already blunted by Defiants and Hurricanes, and they turned for home after inflicting minimal damage. The Eastchurch raid was more successful, with bombs hitting aircraft and buildings. Nevertheless, Luftwaffe intelligence was still unaware Eastchurch was in fact a Coastal Command base and any raid here had no effect on Fighter Command's operational abilities. The next raid took place soon after midday and Deere recalled the response:

‘They covered the whole sky ahead,' recalled the Kiwi, as he spotted a ‘solid mass of aircraft from about 15,000 ft up to 32,000 ft at which height a dozen or so 109s weaved along in the wake of the hundreds of escort fighters below.' Deere was leading the squadron with the replacement squadron leader in tow. ‘Tallyho,' ordered Deere over the radio and he pushed the control column forward and launched an attack on the enemy. Three Me 109s were shot down without loss.

At 4.50p.m. during a second raid on Rochford the New Zealander got hits in on two Me 109s but would later claim only one probable. His biggest threat was not the enemy on this occasion but a nasty incident of friendly fire. ‘I was shot down by a Spitfire,' he typed in his post-action report. The fellow RAF pilot had dropped in behind, fired, and severed the control wires to his rudder. Deere had no choice but to bale out. He was flown back to Hornchurch from a nearby Coastal Command base and by then had cooled down from the incident and did not take it further, realising in the confusion of the dogfight he had been honestly mistaken for the enemy.

Meanwhile, other squadrons were scrambled to face an onslaught of what appeared to be a big bomber and fighter formation. In fact, there were no bombers, only fighters. This was just the sort of fighter-on-fighter action Park assiduously wanted to avoid, but it was too late. Among the pilots was the Anzac Bill Hodgson of 85 Squadron. Flying under the motto
Noctu Diuque Venamur
(‘we hunt by day and night'), the unit had a proud history to maintain. Although it was not deployed in the Great War until June of 1918, the squadron soon built up a reputation for lethality in the air under the leadership of the famous ‘Mick' Mannock. By war's end it had collected ninety-nine victories and a number of the pilots became aces in their own right. Reformed in the run up to the Second World War it saw extensive action in France in 1940 and in a nine-day period had ninety confirmed and many more unconfirmed victories. Nevertheless, while covering the Allied retreat it suffered severe casualties. A former radio technician from Dunedin, Hodgson was posted to the squadron in its post-Dunkirk rebuilding phase.

Flying from Croydon, Hodgson's unit was vectored to intercept an enemy formation of about 20 Me 109s near Dungeness. The twenty-nine-year-old misjudged his first attack, diving too fast right through the formation, but then spotted a couple of Me 109s making for France. He gave chase, pushing his Hurricane down to near sea level. Closing to within 250 yards, he fired; black and white smoke streamed from the stricken machine and pieces of fuselage torn from the body of the fighter skipped past him. By now they were barely twenty feet above the water and the wounded fighter had only half its rudder intact and had slowed to 120 mph.[23] The chase had taken him to within five miles of Cap Gris Nez and with diminishing stocks of fuel the Kiwi reluctantly turned for home. Hodgson's one victory was added to four other squadron successes, with the loss of only a single machine.

As the assaults on the airfields closer to London continued, the tactics of the more experienced squadrons and their airmen evolved with constant tinkering and refinement. Although Park was advocating a concentration by his fighters on the enemy's bombers, a stubborn informal division between Hurricanes and Spitfires remained as both sets of pilots were reluctant to simply wade into the bombers without at least a modicum of security against attacks from escorting Me 109s. All pilots recognised the usefulness of the sturdy Hurricane against the lower flying bombers and the agile high-altitude attributes of the Spitfire in running interference against the fighters. For the Spitfire pilots little had changed, with altitude the most valuable advantage sought in advance of a major fight. For the Hurricanes, however, a newer tactic was beginning to gain popularity, but at a cost.

Hurricane pilots had been seeking ever-better ways to break up bomber formations. Aside from the obvious benefits of a fighter escort, the next best defence for the German raiders was a tight formation that offered a wall of concentrated defensive fire. Recognising that safety lay in numbers, the bomber pilots clung to their comrades for dear life. The RAF pilots' antidote was direct and brutal: full head-on attacks. The evasive action by the leading German machines scattered the formation and with the pack broken, isolated Junkers, Heinkels and Dorniers were more easily picked off. A successful assault on the formation's leader was dispiriting to the remaining machines and removed its vital command component. This tactic had the advantage of simplicity and effectiveness.

The defensive weaponry of the bombers was less well placed to handle a frontal assault and the lethality of RAF fire power in a head-on offensive compared with a rear attack was undeniable given the Luftwaffe decision to fit protective rear armour to its aircraft. Unlike the fighter pilots, who in a frontal attack were shielded by a bullet-proof Perspex canopy and a massive chunk of metal in the form of the 12-cylinder Merlin motor, the German bomber pilots could only look on with increasing dread behind their glasshouse-like enclosure. Yet there were risks for the Hurricanes.

While a stern or beam attack involved overtaking an enemy bomber, this method had both machines hurtling towards each other at a frightening rate of knots. With a closing speed approaching 500 mph it was a dangerous game of ‘chicken' that only allowed for a very short burst of fire, and it could go terribly wrong. On 16 August, a flying officer of 111 Squadron was
killed when he ploughed into a Dornier. The tactic was less desirable against other machines, including the Me 110. Nine days later, when the leader of 17 Squadron tried it against a formation of the twin-engine heavy-fighters his left wing was amputated by German machine-gun fire and the aircraft simply fell out of the sky carrying its pilot to a watery grave.[24] A handful of aggressive pilots had employed head-on assaults as far back as the battle for France, but it had largely been the preserve of the brave or reckless. As the situation deteriorated in August it was increasingly adopted across Fighter Command.

One of its recent Anzac converts was Hodgson in the Hurricane-equipped 85 Squadron. The unit spotted the enemy south of Ramsgate on the morning of 30 August, and Hodgson assailed a huge formation of some 250 machines.

The day had been a busy one for Hodgson, who had undertaken at least four sorties. It was the midway point of five days of brutal aerial combat, during which the squadron's Anzac claimed four Me 109s destroyed, a probable Me 110, damage to a couple of Do 17s and shares in numerous others.[26] Hodgson's own efforts were cut short the next day when he was hit by an Me 109's cannon fire. A major coolant artery was severed, spraying glycol and oil in a thick sheet over the hot Merlin engine. The result was a rapidly spreading fire. Feverishly he unstrapped himself and was halfway out of the dying fighter when he belatedly realised it was making a beeline for a string of Thames' oil tanks abutting a heavily populated district. Bravely he retook his seat and pushed the control column away from the township. To prevent
his immediate incineration, he side-slipped the machine to control the fire, allowing him to make a wheels-up landing. For this and other successful actions that month, he was awarded the DFC.

In the normal course of things it was expected that the Luftwaffe would allow a momentary respite of an hour or two, but not on 30 August. By midday Park had his entire inventory in the air and called on 12 Group once again to bring its best into battle and protect the airfields. Reluctant to be tethered to guard duties, Leigh-Mallory sent the pilots on sweeping operations in search of intruders. Thus when Ju 88s arrived over Biggin Hill they found the airfield unattended and it was only by sheer good fortune for Fighter Command and abject misfortune for the local civilians that, on this occasion, the bombs ended up landing on the nearby villages. The afternoon saw continuous combat as wave after wave battered Britain. It was clear that the Germans were making the final push to secure aerial superiority in the lead-up to the invasion. In all, twenty-two fighter squadrons flew an unprecedented 1054 sorties against Kesselring's formations.[27] If the earlier attack against Biggin Hill had been unsuccessful, the final assault on the base at 6.00p.m. was an altogether different matter.

Bombers appeared over the base and caught 79 Squadron on the deck. One of the squadron's pilot officers, Tracey, was in the process of refuelling after having just engaged in battle and tried to take off, but the Hurricane was heavily buffeted by falling bombs and damaged by flying shrapnel.[28] The New Zealander survived the raid but others did not as bombs fell on the base. One direct hit on a shelter trench killed all the occupants. Another bomb exploded next to a trench hiding a dozen WAAFs. The concrete walls collapsed and earth fell in, burying the women.

The long, drawn-out summer had hardened the ground, slowing the work of the men feverishly attempting to reach those trapped. Barely recognisable, with dirt-covered faces and torn attire, all the WAAFs were extracted alive except one. ‘She was the only one, and she would be from New Zealand, bless her heart,' said Felicity Peake, the WAAFs commanding officer. It was Corporal Lena Button, a medical orderly. Peake did not immediately recognise her, and confessed later that she, ‘like a fool, went around calling out, “Corporal Button where are you? You are needed!”' Button was in fact an Australian who had lived for a season in New Zealand. She was one of the first Anzac women to die as a war casualty, and one of the thirty-nine killed and twenty-six injured in all at Biggin Hill on that day.[29] Hits were scored against a hangar, barracks and storehouses. The raid severed
communications and Hornchurch was given control of the sector until such time as contact with the outside world was restored.