‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Winston Churchill
On 1 August 1940, Hitler, finally accepting that no compromise peace was possible with Britain, ordered the destruction of the Royal Air Force as a prerequisite to the invasion of Britain. So the great air offensive started in earnest on 13 August, commencing with attacks on fighter airfields and radar installations on the South Coast. By the end of August many aerodromes had been badly damaged and the heavy loss in fighter planes had become almost unsustainable. Pilots were very tired and morale was slipping. Goering then decided to switch his main effort to day attacks on London, which gave Fighter Command the respite needed to revitalise its effort in fulfilling and expanding its defensive and offensive capabilities. From the end of October 1940 the aerial Battle for Britain could be said to have finished in Britain’s favour. Hitler’s aim of destroying the RAF had become completely unattainable. Heavy German bombing of cities, with considerable damage and disruption, continued until 16 May 1941, then the air armadas were withdrawn to the East, where Hitler had another role awaiting them. The invasion of Britain was quietly shelved.
One of those who fought in the Battle of Britain was Alan Gawith, a New Zealander, who was accepted for a short service commission with the Royal Air Force and commenced training in the United Kingdom in June 1938:
‘I managed to complete my training and was posted to a Blenheim Night Fighter Squadron when all I really wanted was to get into a Hurricane or Spitfire Squadron. It was No 23 Squadron based at Wittering Airfield, not far from Peterborough. In many ways it was a pretty leisurely and enjoyable life, but I wasn’t what I would call the least bit well trained by the time the war started. Those months of September/October 1939 were busy months for me. I was a Pilot Officer, busy all during the day for long hours on the adjutant’s job and trying to get a bit of flying in, and I had become engaged to my New Zealand girlfriend a few weeks before the war started and we decided to get married because she was caught in England and couldn’t get home again. That meant getting the Station Commander’s permission, which was quite an experience, but he granted us permission and even went through and shouted [treated] us immediately after the wedding, on 4 October 1939. My wife had got herself a job as a landgirl on a farm not far away and she carried on with that and I carried on with my work.
Alan Gawith
My work as adjutant terminated at the end of October and the flying went on, mainly searchlight co-operation at night and training, practising, getting some hours in, getting experience during the daylight. Life was pretty busy, particularly because we had to keep crews on standby every night in case of enemy activity, which didn’t start up for many, many months. We were busy expanding, forming more squadrons and, with shortage of crews and aircraft, we were doing stretches of perhaps seven, eight and nine nights consecutively on standby in the hangar or flying. Not a great deal of spare time during the day after one had caught up with a bit of sleep, eaten and so on, and I didn’t see a great deal of my wife during that time, but as the winter wore on and the weather was getting colder I felt that I couldn’t leave her struggling with milking cows twice a day in those sort of conditions, so we got digs in the village of Wansford. I was living out from then on, which meant that I missed out on the mess life, which is half of the fun of the war really, and I had the extra responsibilities. However, we got by.
Nothing much happened until, oh, we got radar, airborne radar in June 1940, which was pretty useless but still we had to practise to try and make it work. It was in June 1940, I think, that we had our first combat as a Squadron, when both Flight Commanders, Spike O’Brien and Duke Willy, had combats and managed to shoot at two enemy aircraft, not using radar but by visual sightings. Unfortunately O’Brien’s aircraft got into a spin and he tried to get his air gunner out of the aircraft with difficulty and eventually got himself free, but the gunner had met the prop on the way out and was killed. I think we lost two aircraft that night, but I think we got two enemy aircraft so we were all square. It wasn’t a very satisfactory start to the Squadron’s war.
The Battle of Britain then came on and, of course, the Day Squadrons were thoroughly occupied. We were in No 12 Group, which was the backup group for Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group, which really fought the battle in the south. Our job then became care of the convoys around the coast of Norfolk. The Day Squadrons had been doing those patrols and the enemy were raiding the convoys quite regularly, sinking ships. We used to start before dawn and I can remember many occasions when we took off in the dark and flew up into the dawn, long before it was daylight on the ground. In some convoys we would often find a ship or two sinking but no enemy in sight. We patrolled for month after month. It wasn’t dangerous, simply because we never seemed to be there when the enemy was there and we couldn’t quite understand that, but there wouldn’t have been much point in patrolling at night.
On 13 August my son was born. I’d just got my wife established back at home from the hospital with our infant, and on 11 September I got a call to say that I was to report back to the Squadron immediately. The Squadron had been posted to Forde airfield, which we’d taken over from the Royal Naval Air Service just south of Arundel on the coast of Sussex. So I had to desert my new family, leave them in the tender care of the landlord and landlady, and disappear down to the South Coast where we landed on a very small airstrip about 800 yards long with our Blenheims, which were used to longer fields.
We hadn’t been established there very long before the attacks came in from the coast. The enemy would swoop in about dusk and machine-gun the camp. We lived in wooden huts whilst there, and we’d guard our aircraft. Two or three times we had those attacks and, of course, nothing much we could do about it. We were in the front line at last; there were one or two casualties and we had one or two aircraft destroyed, and we found what it was like to be under fire. You get machine-gun fire when you’re in the mess and you sort of burrow under the carpet – it’s as simple as that. Bullets whistling through these wooden walls made one duck. However, we survived those all right.
We saw the battle going on, the day battle up above, and we knew what the base squadrons were tackling. We didn’t know a great deal more than the civilian population; we could see what was going on, and we heard from pilots who came in and our pilots who visited base squadrons nearby, Tangmere Airfield and others. We knew, as the time went on, how grim things were; Fighter Command was strained to the limit. Sir Keith Park – he wasn’t Sir Keith then – was not getting the support he needed from his friend Leigh-Mallory to the north, who insisted on holding his squadrons back until he’d got them mounted into wings of three or five squadrons. The Hun doesn’t wait for that sort of nonsense. Park’s theory was to attack every time; even if he only had three aircraft, they would get out and do their best. It’s amazing how much a single attack by a small number of aircraft diving down through a lumbering flotilla of bombers, shooting down two or three of them on the way through, is effective in diverting the attack or splitting it up, and Park never missed the opportunity. He’d get aircraft from somewhere and make sure that the Hun got some sort of reception.
Of course, we were aware that everybody’s nerves were getting frayed when the attack on the airfields was at its height. We weren’t getting the same plastering as they were getting at the sectional airfields where the Day Squadrons were. Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Manston and others were getting it all the time. It was not the actual bombing so much as the constant day and night attacks, and nobody was getting any sleep. It was the exhaustion that was wearing out the aircrew, the ground crew, the controllers, the WAAF staff, everybody. Had that gone on for another week I don’t think Fighter Command would have survived, and there was nothing to stop the enemy coming across except Fighter Command’s air supremacy. However, it’s doubtful to me whether we had air supremacy, but at least with the help of radar and the system that had been set up by Dowding in the few years before the war, and the systems like the short service commissions getting in young fellows from around the Empire, then the British, mainly British, getting them trained just before the war, that was the only reason that Britain survived, I think, the Battle of Britain. It wouldn’t have survived