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FREEDOM'S BATTLE VOLUME II
THE WAR IN THE AIR
1939-1945
Born in 1932, Gavin Lyall read English Literature
at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was an RAF
pilot and worked as a journalist with Picture Post
and the Sunday Times. His books include The
Wrong Side of the Sky, Midnight Plus One,
Operation Warboard and Spy's Honour. He died
in 2003.
GAVIN LYALL
Freedom's Battle Volume II
The War in the Air
1939-1945
An Anthology of Personal Experience
Selected and Edited by Gavin Lyall
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Max Arthur
'For Freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to Son,
Though baffled oft is ever won.'
Lord Byron, The Giaour
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Published by Vintage 2007
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Preface and Commentary © Gavin Lyall 1968
Introduction © Max Arthur 2007
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First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Hutchinson
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1 V 2SA
First Pimlico .edition published in 1994
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Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CRO 4TD
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction by Max Arthur Xl
Glossary XVll
Editor's Preface XIX
1939 1
1940 17
1941 779
1942 159
1943 237
1944 315
1945 537
Index 413
Illustrations
Hurricanes and Spitfires
A Messerschmitt 109 caught by the guns
The sting in the nose of the Beaufighter
The Mosquito night-fighter cockpit
A Heinkel III dies at night
Mosquito
The 'heavy bomber' of 1940
Weight increase: the heaviest bomb of the war
Crete, 1941
The 'stolen Stuka'
Fighter boy: 'Johnnie' Johnson
Bomber boy: Guy Gibson
Short take-off, no landing
U-boat K.II
Shipping strike
A Lancaster over the fires of Berlin
A Lancaster over the wasteland of Cologne
This Halifax of 51 Squadron lost ten feet of its nose
A Spitfire's overload tank is filled with beer
Spitfire on a French airfield in 1944
Typhoon conditions
Tipping a V-I flying bomb into a dive
V-I seen from a camera-gun
All photographs except' A Heinkel dies at night' (source unkown) are
reproduced by permission of the Imperial War Museum
Acknowledgements
The author and publisher thank the relevant copyright holders for
permission to EJ.uote from:
Guy Gibson. Enemy Coast Ahead. Pan 1957; Air Ministry. Bomber
Command. HMSO 1941; Tom Moulson. The Flying Sword. Macdonald;
Paul Riley. Fighter Pilot. Hutchinson 1955; P. R. Reid. Winged
Diplomat. Chatto and Windus 1962; No~l Monks. Fighter Squadron.
Angus and Robertson. Sydney 1941; Peter Wykeham. Fighter
Command. Putnam;]. E.Johnson. Wing Leader. Chatto and Windus;
Ian Gleed. Arise to Conquer. Gollancz 1942; Winged Words. Heine
mann 1941; Al Deere. Nine Lives. Hodder and Stoughton; Richard
Hillary. The Last Enemy. Macmillan; John Gillespie MacGee. High
Flight; D. M. Crook. Spitfire Pilot. Faber and Faber; Larry Forrester.
Fly for your Lifo. Frederick Muller 1956; John Pudney. For Johnny;
William L. Shirer. Berlin Diary. Hamish Hamilton; Hector Bolitho.
A Penguin in the Eyrie. Hutchinson 1955; Adolf Galland. The First
and the Last. Methuen; Winston ChurchilI. The Second World War.
Cassell; Graham. Wallace. Biggin Hill. Putnam; Sholto Douglas.
Years of Command. Collins; C. F. Rawnsley and Robert Wright.
Night Fighter. Collins 1957; Alan Moorehead. Desert Trilogy.
Hamish Hamilton; Atlantic Bridge. HMSO 1945; Edward Lanchbery.
Against the Sun. Cassell; Roderick Chisholm. Cover of Darkness.
Chatto and Windus; J. R. D. Braham. Scramble. Frederick Muller
I¢I;JohnBeede. Thq Hosed Them Out. Australasian Book Society.
Sydney 1965; Constance Babington Smith. Evidence in Camera. Chatto
and Windus; Sir John Slessor. The Central Blue, Cassell; Roderic
Owen, The Desert Air Force, Hutchinson; Sir Bernard Fergusson,
The Black Watch and the King's Enemies. Collins 1950; Arthur G.
Donahue. Last Flight from Singapore, Macmillan 1944; John Masters,
The Road past Mandalay, Michael Joseph; Sir Philip Joubert. Birds
and Fishes, The Fated Sky, Fun and Games and The Forgotten Ones,
Hutchinson; Ralph Barker, The Ship Busters. Chatto and Windus
1957; Flying Officer 'X' (H. E. Bates). The Greatest People in the
x ACKNOWLBDGEMENTS
World, Jonathan Cape 1942; Herbert Corby, Missing; George W.
Stoughton, They Flew Through Sand, Jarrolds Ltd. 1942; Kenneth
Hemingway, Wings Over Burma, Qualits Press (London) 1944;
I.M.S.H.I., A Fighter Pilot's Letters to his Mother, W. H. Allen 1943;
Pierre C}ostennann, Flames in the Sky and The Big Show, Chatto
and Windw;J. E.Johnson, Full Circle, Chatto and Windw; Donald
Bennett, Pathfinder, Muller; Sir Gordon Taylor, The Sky Beyond,
Penguin; J. A. Crosby Warren, The Flight Testing of Produaion
Aircraft, Pitman 1943; Michael Foot, S.O.E. in France, HMSO;
Ralph Barker, The Thousand Plan, Chatto and Windw; Group
Captain Dudley Saward, The Bomber's Eye, Cassell 1959; Sir Arthur
Harris, Bomber Offensive, Collins 1947; Ralph Barker, Down in the
Drink, Chatto and Windw; C. H. Ward-Jackson, The Airman's
Song Book, Sylvan Press, London, 1945; Ivan Southall, They Shall
Not Pass Unseen, Angw and Robertson 1956; Mike Lithgow,
Vapour Trails, Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd. 1957; Gavin Ewart,
When a Bean Goes In; Paul Brickhill, The Dam Busters, Evans Bros.
1951; Martha Gellhom, The Face of War, Rupert Hart-Davis 1959;
Sir Basil Embry, Mission Completed, Landsborough Publications
Ltd.; A. H. Wheeler, That Nothing Failed Them, G. T. Foulis & Co.
1963; Henry Treece, Lincolnshire Bomber Station; Wilhelm Johnen,
Duel under the Stars, Kimber Pocket Edition 195B; Geoff Taylor,
Piece of Cake, Peter Davies 1956; W/Cdr. Barry Sutton, Jungle Pilot,
Macmillan 1946; Wings of the Phoenix, HMSO 1949; Alison King,
Golden Wings, C. Arthur Pearson Ltd. 1956; Paul Brickhill, Escape
or Die, Evans Bros. 1952; RAAP Directorate of Public Relations,
R.A.A.F. Saga, Awtralian War Memorial, Canberra; David Irving,
The Destruction of Dresden, Kimber; SlUr. R. Raymond and S/Ldr.
David Langdon, Slipstream, Eyre and Spottiswoode 1946.
Introduction
by Max Arthur
Gavin Lyall, who edited the original edition of The War in the
Air, was himself a National Service pilot during the 1950s, flying
Tiger Moths and Meteors. A particularly fine writer, he was the
ideal choice to edit this anthology of the Royal Air Force in the
Second World War.
He wisely adopts a chronological approach to the subject and
starts the book with one of the most famous fliers, Guy Gibson,
who was later to lead the Dambusters Raid. Already a profes
sional pilot in September 1939 at the age of 21, Gibson recalled
the days before Britain actually declared war. 'A world about to
go mad. For us a runny feeling that the next day we might not
be in this world.'
After the Phoney War, in April 1940 British troops landed in
northern Norway. The RAF soon saw action, flying outdated
Gloucester Gladiators alongside the Hurricanes. By May, the
German Blitzkrieg had overrun Holland, Belgium and areas of
northern France, forcing the British Expeditionary Force to retreat
towards Dunkirk. It is here that Lyall has chosen Al Deere to
describe an early dogfight. One of the outstanding fighter pIlots
of the Second World War, Deere was also one of the luckiest pilots
to survive. In the space of a few weeks he collided with an Me 109,
was shot down by a Spitfire and then had a wing of his plane
blown off by a bomb during a scramble. Sent home to prepare
pilots for the next phase of the war, he was forced to bailout
after a mid-air collision over Sussex.
Although there were many losses, the RAF was fortunate to
have experienced pilots from the Royal Air Force Volunteer
Reserve and the University Squadrons. From the former, Lyall
has chosen to quote from the memoirs of the exceptional pilot
X11 INTRODUCTION
Johnnie Johnson, the highest-scoring British ace of the war, who
flew throughout the conflict, and from the latter, the brilliant but
ill-fated Richard Hillary. A handsome, gifted young pilot, Hillary
was badly disfigured after one skirmish, but recovered to fly again.
In his classic work, The Last Enemy, he wrote: 'The fighter pilot's
emotions are those of a duellist - cool, precise, impersonal. He is
privileged to kill well'. He himself was killed in 1943.
Lyalljuxtaposes this with the more practical Adolf 'Sailor' Malan,
credited with thirty-two kills, whose tactical genius was summarised
in his 'Ten Commandments' for attacking the enemy. For many
pilots these became an operational bible and the key to their
survival. His first commandment began: 'Wait until you see the
whites of his eyes. Fire short bursts of one to two seconds, and
only when your sights are definitely "on".' His tenth ran: 'Go in
quickly - punch hard - get out!'
Churchill's legendary 'Few', on whom all of Britain depended
for survival, achieved an heroic status.A dressing down by a senior
officer captures their cavalier attitude towards uniform and disci
pline at Biggin Hill during the Batde:' ... you have turned the
living quarters which were allotted to you to provide a certain
amount of security and rest into a nightclub ... Your clothes -
I can scarcely call them a uniform. I will not tolerate check shirts,
old-school ties or suede shoes; while you are on duty you will
wear regulation dress. Neither will I tolerate pink pyjamas under
your tunics.'
With the Battle of Britain over, the following year everyone
became increasingly desperate to bring the war to an end. Some
amazing suggestions were sent to the Air Ministry, such as drop
ping bombs down Vesuvius so as to explode southern Italy. One
man from South Africa proposed that millions of snakes should
be shipped from his country and released on a dark night over
German towns, as well as cabbage leaves impregnated with poison.
However, in fairness, this same man predicted the exact date and
outcome of the end of the war: 4 May, 1945, with Britain on
top!
The legendary Douglas Bader features strongly in the first half
of the book. In hospital, after he was captured by the Germans
in 1941, he was visited by the Luftwqffe ace, Adolf Galland. They
