Speed Kings (38 page)

For Billy, they were frustrating days too. He was scrambled three, sometimes four times a day, yet he always seemed to miss out on the action. Which infuriated him. Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, who was Billy's flight leader, joked that “you may talk of the dangers of war, but you can have small idea of what it means until you try coming back across the Channel in a tight formation with
Fisky—in a rage because the Germans haven't stayed to fight—close on your tail with his finger on the button.” On August 8, after several weeks of skirmishing, a British convoy of twenty-five ships, code-named “Peewit,” was attacked by a force of hundreds of German aircraft while sailing from Southend on the east coast of England through the Straits of Dover to Swanage on the south coast. The fighting was so intense that many of the pilots, including Billy, considered it the start of the Battle of Britain. “Blitz starts,” he noted in his logbook. Billy was scrambled four times. And he didn't get to fire a single bullet. He filled his log with little notes recording that he had been “too early for the fun,” then “too late,” then “too early,” then “too late” again. The biggest fight of the battle yet had taken place off the Isle of Wight, just a few miles away. Billy had spent five and a half hours in the air and had seen only one “bandit” all day. He always seemed to be in the right place at the wrong time. His third patrol had ended ten minutes before the first German attack, and his final one started just as the last was finishing. And while 601 was shuttling back and forth and scouring the skies, 43 Squadron, the “Fighting Cocks,” who were also based at Tangmere, had been fighting for their lives and had lost two pilots. Billy had been itching to “do something,” as he wrote in his diary, for so long that the urge was getting to be unbearable. He wouldn't have to wait much longer.

That Sunday, August 11, was the finest morning anyone had seen all week. It had been bad for the last two days, all thick cloud and heavy rain, but that morning the sun rose into a clear blue sky. Billy and the others had already eaten breakfast and were stretching out in their deck chairs, warming their bones in the first rays of the morning sun, when the call came through. The radar stations over toward Dover had detected a swarm of enemy aircraft assembling over Cherbourg.

“SCRAMBLE!”

They had two minutes, from start to finish—an age for a man accustomed to covering the Cresta Run in under sixty seconds. The pilots grabbed their kit, helmets, gauntlets, “Mae West” life jackets, and sprinted across the grass to their aircraft. Their parachutes were waiting for them, on the wing. The ground crew helped the pilots shove the packs on, then boosted them up onto the wing. Billy trod warily, careful not to slip, then flicked his legs up and over and plopped himself down in the cockpit. Even for a man of his build, there wasn't much room to move. He was surrounded by instruments, gears, cogs, pedals, and levers, each with its own purpose.

First, before he could fire her up, he had to run through his final checks, just
as he had once done with his Bentley back on La Croisette. Check the pneumatic pressure for the brakes, slip the trim in neutral and the rudder over hard right to counter the torque on takeoff, tighten the throttle nut. Then flick the magnetos, and start the engine. The exhausts fired shotgun blasts of blue gas back past the fuselage, which were immediately whipped into the air as the propeller began to spin. Billy had to crank the seat up as high as it would go so he could peer around the long nose of the aircraft as he taxied over to his takeoff position; even then he had to swing the plane this way and that to get a clear view of the ground in front of him. At the end of the runway he held the plane on the brakes as he advanced the throttle. As the note of the engine rose higher and higher, the plane began to buck and shudder. He let the brakes slip, and it shot forward across the grass. Lurching, bounding, bobbing, till the tail rose into the air; lift, bounce, lift again, and then the up-and-away into the sky.

The first reports from the observation posts were in now. It wasn't a wing the Germans were sending, but an armada. The single largest force that had come across the Channel in one body yet, almost two hundred aircraft, half of them heavy bombers, the rest fighters. All bound for Portland Naval Base, one hundred miles down the coast. The squadron had twelve planes up, all now assembled and in formation above St. Catherine's Point, and they got their orders from Control. They were given a vector and an altitude, and told to fly on toward Portland. It was fifteen minutes' flying time, even at top speed.

They were over Swanage, about halfway there, when they saw them. “A very large number of enemy aircraft,” wrote Willie Rhodes-Moorhouse, “milling around some miles to the south.” They were about twenty miles off. Rhodes-Moorhouse led the squadron in a turn toward the enemy. And at that exact point, his engine cut out. He turned back to Tangmere and told the squadron to carry on. Billy took charge. He called, “Line astern” over the radio, ordering the ten remaining planes to follow his lead as he flew, full throttle, toward the enemy. They were utterly outnumbered. But the odds didn't figure. They flew, without hesitation, into a formation so vast they hardly knew where to start. “They seemed to be in countless tiers upward ad infinitum,” remembered Mouse Cleaver. “They were so thick we almost had a permanent target.” Billy didn't stop to look back. He took it on trust that the squadron was following him in. And then “we came into direct contact with the enemy aircraft—and broke up for individual attack.”

The South African RAF ace Adolph “Sailor” Malan had said that there were ten rules for dogfighting. The pilots knew them inside out because they
were posted up on the noticeboards in the mess halls around the country. Billy and 601 had broken two of them before they'd even opened fire.
Air discipline and team work are words that mean something in air fighting; when diving to attack, always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as a top guard.
But now it was each man for himself. Billy focused, as he flew in, on the first rule:
Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.
He was three hundred yards out when he first fired. A touch too far, but he thought he saw the bullets hit home. And in that moment, he broke a third rule:
While shooting think of nothing else
. A second aircraft passed across his sights, so he switched his aim. In the confusion, he nearly collided with the second plane. He swerved. And then he was through and out the other side of the swarm.
Never fly straight and level for more than thirty seconds in the combat area
. He carried on out of range, climbing all the time.
Height gives you the initiative
. He circled around and, looking down, saw another target. He fired again and saw smoke explode from its starboard motor. It dropped down out of sight. He picked out another, this one flying straight on, a way below him. “I dived straight at him and gave a good burst, narrowly missing him as he passed underneath. He went into a steep dive from about 16,000 feet.” He watched it all the way down ten thousand feet, and in doing so broke another rule:
Always keep a sharp lookout.
There was a Messerschmitt on his tail.
Always turn and face the attack.
Instead, Billy whistled down into a steep, spiraling dive.
Make your decisions promptly. It is better to act quickly, even though your tactics are not of the best.
If he held the dive too long, the engine would cut out under the negative g-force. He dropped, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet. It was enough. He had lost the Messerschmitt. And by the time he climbed again, the skies were clear. The enemy had gone. Just like that. He cut out for Tangmere.

They called it the Battle of Portland. Four of 601's pilots died fighting it, among them Dick Demetriadi, who was Rhodes-Moorhouse's brother-in-law, and W. G. Dickie, a wingman of Billy's in Blue flight. But 601 had shot down twelve themselves. Rhodes-Moorhouse had gotten two of them. He'd been halfway back to Tangmere when he realized that his fuel switch was turned to “reserve.” As soon as he flicked it back the right way, the plane burst into life again, and he returned to the fight. Billy claimed three planes as “badly damaged”: the truth was that the Browning .303 machine guns used by the Hurricanes were so small-caliber that the German planes were often able to absorb any damage inflicted and flee the fight, heading back to their bases in France. “Terrific fight,” Billy wrote in his log. “Had to lead squadron in, Willie's engine
failed! Terrified but fun.” That night, when once he had come off duty, he drove over to the house at Chidham. He was in a great hurry to tell Rose all about it. “I'd never seen him so excited,” she said. Her mother had come to visit. The two of them sat up, enthralled, as he talked them through the fight, blow-by-blow. “His description of that day was terrific,” recalled his mother-in-law. “They found what looked like a spiral swarm of bees & Bill then went slap into them and out the other side 3 or 4 times—until the whole thing broke up and eventually disappeared under our fighters' onslaught. Bill himself got four. Said far the most difficult was not avoiding the bullets that day, but the other planes!”

Billy was high on excitement. Later, when the adrenaline surge had seeped away, he felt spent. All the pilots did. They slumped. Some started to shake. The stress was just too much. They drank cocoa to keep their blood sugar up, but that was all the relief they had. There was no respite. Tuesday, August 13, was the fiercest day of fighting yet. The Germans named it Adlertag—Eagle Day. They launched an all-out aerial assault on the RAF's airfields across the south. They meant it to be the beginning of the end for the RAF. Waves of enemy aircraft came in, as many as ten an hour, over Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. The RAF would be stretched so tight across so many fronts that they would surely snap. And the Germans were right: the RAF was reaching its breaking point. At Tangmere, 145 Squadron had been withdrawn from action because it had lost ten pilots—half its strength—in just three days of fighting.

“The thing that all of us in the RAF were aware of, ground staff and pilots, was that we were running desperately short of pilots, aircraft [(A/C)], and A/C spares,” wrote Bill Littlemore, a flight mechanic with 43 Squadron. “The problem of delay in waiting for spares and new A/C was minimized by the initiative of the maintenance crews bringing in the idea of cannibalization of just one A/C, to strip from it urgently awaited spare parts, rather than have a number of A/C unserviceable because they were all awaiting the arrival of spare parts before they could be got into the air . . . With regard to the losses of pilots which we could ill afford, and the rate at which we were losing them, [that brought] us to a position where but for the arrival of chaps like Billy Fiske and all those other wonderful guys who came from distant lands, we should have been the losers, of that there is no doubt.”

At Tangmere, the first “scramble” call on Eagle Day came in at 6:30 a.m. “Too early,” Billy grumbled. Flying north, they saw the enemy five miles distant, toward Midhurst. Bombers. They formed into Vs, ready to attack. Billy picked out one enemy, fired on it until he saw white smoke burst from its motors. “A
good burst,” four seconds long, as he closed from three hundred yards to within just one hundred. It broke off, and Billy watched as another Hurricane came down on its tail. He turned away, toward the rear of the enemy formation. He picked out another plane, toward the back of the pack. This one looked to be making a bombing run. Billy took a quick glance around. He couldn't see a target other than the Midhurst-Pulborough railway line. The plane must have been in trouble and looking to jettison its load before turning back. He fired again. He was so close to it that he saw the starboard engine stop turning. It broke into a dive, straight down from eight thousand feet into the low cloud below. He followed it, firing all the way. Each of the Hurricane's eight guns carried around 330 rounds, and they fired them at a rate of 1,100 per minute. Which meant, in all, Billy had only about eighteen seconds of firing time before he was out of ammunition. That was why it was so important to use short, sharp bursts. It was too easy to get carried away—which is what Billy did. By the time he had pulled out of the dive, his guns were empty. He could still see the enemy, smoke trailing from one engine. It was too damaged to climb. “At least,” Billy thought, “I won't let him escape.” He tailed it out toward the coast, calling out on his radio for someone to come and finish it off. He followed it, in fact, right over the top of his house at Chidham, and broke off the pursuit only once he saw the puffs of brown and black smoke start to explode as they came within range of the anti-aircraft guns on the Isle of Wight.

As soon as he got a chance, he called Rose. He was so excited, like a child who wants to show off to his mother. “Did you see me?” he asked her. He was sure she must have seen him chasing the enemy out to sea. But Rose had been tucked up in bed. And nothing, not even a dogfight over the rooftops, was going to drag her up at 7 a.m. All she wanted was for him to be happy. The reason she lived so near Tangmere, she said, was that he got “a day's rest at home, if that home was near. The only thought of all the women, myself included, was to make our man happy. We lived for them.” But that day, worn down by stress and fatigue, “he was furious with me,” she remembered. “He had got on the tail of a plane, and herded it right across our house so I could watch him. He was all in a rage because I wouldn't get out of bed to look.”

“Well,” Rose said, hoping to placate him, “if I'd known it was you of course I would have gone to watch.” But it was no good. “He couldn't understand why I couldn't tell his Hurricane from all the others just by the sound of it.”

Rose might not have been watching, but plenty of other people were. The fighting went on all day, and the skies above Britain were filled with webs of
white vapor trails, sinuous plumes of smoke, bright sparks of metal in the sun, and occasional flashes of explosions. From the ground, it all looked so graceful, balletic even. For the pilots in the cockpits high above, it was hell. An unceasing assault on the senses. The sounds: the engine screaming three feet away, guns roaring, a constant crackle of static, shouts and cries in the earphones, and the dry rasp of their own breath in the microphone. The smells: hot rubber and metal, high-octane fuel, cordite, and, often enough, vomit. The stresses: stomachs heaving and revolting as the pilots threw their planes through the most violent maneuvers; eyes watering in the brilliant, blinding sun; necks wet with sweat chafing always against the collar, bowed down by g-forces then thrust back straight against the seat. As they dived and climbed, the sudden changes in air pressure would twist their guts and make them break wind and belch into their face masks. All the while they had to think coolly and clearly enough to survive the combat. Make a mistake up there and you'd had it.