"Flying is dangerous. Flying Spitfires is very dangerous.” -- An Excerpt from "Where Eagles Never Flew"

 

(Setting: An Operational Training Unit following a fatal accident: Early August 1940)

Kennel was waiting for him as he slipped to the ground. “The police have already found him.” Priestman just looked at Kennel, not daring to form the question. “Flew straight in at an estimated 300 miles an hour.”

“I wasn’t flying 300 miles an hour.”

“Maybe not but Acting Pilot Officer Taylor apparently was. Come back up to my office with me.” As they started across the field, the other trainee pilots clustered around. They all looked shocked and shaken. Kennel sent them away. “Stand down. There’ll be no more flying today – or lectures.”

“Is there any hope, sir?” One of the youngsters asked.

“No. He’s been found dead.” Kennel led Priestman into his office. The Adjutant handed a glass of scotch to him.

Priestman took it and sipped at the golden liquid unhappily. He didn’t know what to say.

“There will be an enquiry, of course. The Met was wrong. I shouldn’t have opened the airfield. You should have returned sooner. God knows what Acting Pilot Officer Taylor should have done – but it wasn’t to fly into a mountain at 300 mph.” He paused, sighed. “I’ll write to the next-of-kin. Can you give me all the details you have on Taylor?” This latter was addressed to the adjutant, who nodded. “Anything you can add?” Kennel asked Priestman.

“He was…” Priestman searched for words to describe a young man he had known barely a week. “… insecure. He kept trying to cover it up with bravado.”

“Do you think he’d drunk too much last night?”

“Very likely. I wasn’t with them, but they crashed in late enough.”

“We’d better talk to one or two of the others about that.”

“What does it matter now? You’re not going to put that in the letter to his next-of-kin,” Priestman added a little alarmed.

“No, but it might help with the enquiry.”

Priestman had already forgotten about that, but he supposed this would be the death knell to his career. He’d barely survived the last enquiry. They were bound to throw him out now. God help him, he’d be drafted into the Army!

His expression of foreboding was so explicit that it moved Kennel to remark, “Look, Priestman, there’s no need to look as though you expect to be hanged. We all bear a share of the blame, but things like this happen in training all the time. Flying is dangerous. Flying Spitfires is very dangerous. Give a bunch of teenage boys an extremely fast, powerful aircraft, and the instinct of half of them is to crash it one way or another. It doesn’t help that the Hun is killing, on average, three to four of our pilots every day. Fighter Command needs trained replacements, and it needs them sooner rather than later. If we close down every time conditions aren’t ideal, we’ll either not deliver enough pilots soon enough or we’ll deliver untrained pilots to the operational units – and the Huns will have even more of a field day shooting them out of the sky.”

“That’s over a hundred pilots a month,” Priestman remarked slowly, as he registered what Kennel had just said.

“And half again that many hospitalised,” Kennel added.

“You’re telling me Fighter Command casualties last month were roughly 150 pilots?” Priestman wanted confirmation. “That’s more than six full squadrons.”

“Yes, it is.”

“At that rate, it doesn’t matter how many of them we shoot down. Fighter Command will cease to exist by the end of the year.”

Kennel only shrugged in acknowledgement. They stood there in silence, and now they could hear rain pelting against the windows and the wind howling as a full gale tore down from the Irish Sea. They were all thinking the same thing: the Germans hadn’t even started their main assault yet.

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The Battle of Britain: The Cost

 

In retrospect — or from the perspective of the government — the price of victory in the Battle of Britain was clearly affordable. During the Battle of Britain, the RAF lost 1,023 aircraft compared to the Luftwaffe’s loss of 1,887 aircraft. In fact, due to the dramatic increases in aircraft production introduced by Lord Beaverbrook, the RAF ended the Battle with more front-line fighter aircraft than it had at the start of the Battle. In contrast, the Luftwaffe’s fighter strength declined by 30%. The imbalance in personnel losses was even greater: while the Luftwaffe lost 2,698 airmen during the battle (killed, wounded and captured), the RAF lost 544 pilots killed. (The number of RAF pilots taken prisoner during the Battle, which largely took place over English soil, was negligible, while the majority of wounded RAF pilots also later returned to active service and, therefore, do not weigh in the balance.)

Yet these statistics are deceptive. It must be remembered that pilots at the time were highly trained specialists who could not be easily or rapidly replaced. While the numbers were small compared to the total population, the pilot losses nevertheless represented roughly 40% of Fighter Command’s strength.

What this meant, is that from the perspective of the participants, chances of survival were barely greater than 50%. The situation was aggravated by the fact that, as a rule, the more experienced pilots had a 5-6 times greater chance of surviving than did the replacement pilots coming into the front line with very little flying and no combat experience. The most critical period for a replacement pilot was his first fortnight in the front-line squadron.

In consequence, there were a significant number of pilots who fought throughout the Battle (four full months) and survived, but many other pilots who did not survive four hours. This meant, in effect, that a smallish core of experienced pilots often watched waves of replacements arriving and then being shot-down in a short space of time. Meanwhile, sheer exhaustion wore down even the experienced pilots and by the end of the Battle it was the Squadron Leaders, Flight Lieutenants and Section Leaders who were falling victim as a result of inattention, and “sloppy flying.”

For an individual squadron engaged in the Battle of Britain the pilots who were seriously injured and hospitalised also had to be replaced, so the effective casualty rate (killed and wounded) at squadron level was closer to 70% than 50%. This situation forced ACM Dowding and AVM Park to pull entire squadrons out of the front line (i.e. 11 Group) and replace them with new squadrons when a certain — albeit very subjective — level of exhaustion and depletion had been reached. Altogether 16 squadrons were withdrawn from 11 Group in the one month between August 8 and September 8, 1940.

The problem with this rotation was that the replacement squadrons — like replacement pilots — were far more likely to suffer casualties and far less likely to destroy enemy aircraft than the tired but experienced squadrons. This was because the replacement squadrons often had no pilots with experience of the combat conditions reigning in Southeast England at the time. Without experienced leaders, these fresh squadrons were often mauled badly during their first encounters with the Luftwaffe. It was not uncommon for these squadrons to lose 5 – 6 aircraft and 3 – 4 pilots in a single engagement. 

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“It would be a nice change not to be outnumbered ten to one.” -- An Excerpt from "Where Eagles Never Flew"

 

(Setting: RAF Tangmere: A new pilot observes his comrades, Late August 1940)

The telephone went. The eruption of swearing was truly vile – not just rude but vehement. The clerk was absent for some reason, so the CO grabbed the receiver himself, still chewing. He managed a mere, “MMM.”

The others waited absolutely still, staring at him. He gestured with his hand for them to relax and they audibly unwound, starting to eat and drink more calmly. The CO was nodding. “Um hum. Um hum. OK. Thanks, Bridges.”

“Well?”

“Hornchurch was hit while 54 was still on the ground. They lost a whole section – though not the pilots, it seems – and Biggin Hill was struck again. Second time today. They also gave Debden, North Weald and Croyden a pasting. It seems Jerry really is going for the airfields around London. 12 Group was asked to patrol London and the 11 Group ‘dromes while the squadrons refuelled, but they failed to show up in time.”

“Typical 12 Group,” a man with a posh accent commented.

“Leigh-Mallory thinks his squadrons are more effective if they are flown in a wing. He likes to send them in together,” the CO explained.

“Well, I like that idea. It would be a nice change not to be outnumbered ten-to-one!”

“We never are out-numbered by that many, Woody,” the CO countered very seriously. “And the odds are identical whether we deploy in big wings or squadrons. The difference is at best psychological, and frankly I much prefer things the way they are.”

“Why?” the New Zealander asked bluntly, and by the nodding around the dispersal, Ainsworth had the impression they all wanted to know.

“Because large gaggles just get in each other’s way. Look at the 109s. We generally have somewhere over thirty or even sixty of the buggers up there when we attack, but when it comes down to it, we only fight with about a score. The others never get a chance.”

“Maybe, but frankly, once – just once – I’d like to face them on equal terms.”

 ----

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The Battle of Britain: The Nazi Juggernaut vs a Handful of British Amateurs

 

A purely objective assessment of the Battle of Britain does not explain why interest in the Battle of Britain remains so high 80 years later. There were, after all, many other decisive battles in WWII from Stalingrad to Midway. The appeal of the Battle of Britain is less military and diplomatic than emotional.

In the summer of 1940, the RAF stood against an apparently invincible enemy, a juggernaut of  seemingly huge proportions, while RAF Fighter Command was tiny -- and largely composed of 18-22 year-old amateurs hastily inducted! Even including the foreign pilots flying with the RAF, there were only roughly 1,200 trained fighter pilots. (Numbers varied due to training, casualties and recruiting.) They were anything but "cannon fodder." Although very few of them were "regulars," because the process of learning to fly to the proficiency required took more than a year, fighter pilots represented a cadre that could not be readily replaced. The RAF had to beat the Luftwaffe with the few men it had.

Churchill – as so often – captured the sentiment of his countrymen when he claimed that “never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” This image of a small “band of brothers” standing up to a massive and invincible foe in a defensive battle for their homeland was reminiscent of other heroic battles – Henry V at Agincourt, Edward the Black Prince at Poitiers, Leonidas and his 300 at Thermopylae. Such battles, pitting a few defenders against a hoard of enemy, have always appealed to students of history and readers of historical fiction like almost nothing else.

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