No Place for Chivalry Read online

  Published by

  Grub Street

  4 Rainham Close

  London

  SW11 6SS

  Copyright © 2005 Grub Street

  Text copyright © 2005 Alastair Goodrum

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Goodrum, Alastair

  No place for chivalry : RAF night fighters defend the East

  of England against the German air force in two world wars

  1. Great Britain. Royal Air Force – History – 1939-1945

  2. World War, 1939-1945 – Aerial operations, British

  3. Air defences – Great Britain – History – 20th century

  4. Night fighting (Military science) 5. Night fighter planes

  I. Title

  940.5′44941

  ISBN 1 904943 22 5

  ePUB ISBN: 9781909166530

  PRC ISBN: 9781904943228

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

  means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Typeset by Pearl Graphics, Hemel Hempstead

  Printed and bound by Biddles, King’s Lynn

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 Dangerous Moonlight

  Chapter 2 Zeppelin!

  Chapter 3 Fighter Nights

  Chapter 4 Patrolling the Blue Lines

  Chapter 5 Airborne Searchlights

  Chapter 6 Night Hawks

  Chapter 7 Mosquitoes Bite and Beaufighters Punch

  Chapter 8 Steinbock, Gisela and Buzz-bombs

  Appendix 1 Imperial German Naval Zeppelin incursions over the Midlands region in WW1

  Appendix 2 Interceptions made by aircraft of Wittering and Digby sector night fighter squadrons in WW2

  Appendix 3 Explanatory notes and diagram for AI Mk IV 172

  Appendix 4 Comparative ranks

  Appendix 5 Maps showing Group and Sector boundaries in WW2

  Appendix 6 Map showing locations of Fg Off R P Stevens’ air victories

  Appendix 7 Map showing the distribution of interceptions made by Digby and Wittering night fighter squadrons in WW2

  Appendix 8 Abbreviations used in text

  Bibliography

  Index

  In memory of Jack and Mike

  “. . . night fighter pilots are individualists who do not want very much0to be disciplined. For them night is more free than day,

  free space for the expression of a feud. They find raiders in the moon

  above low cloud, as shadows in the flare of ack-ack and searchlight

  and above the flickering glare of ground fires.”

  H E Bates

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Ian Blackamore and Dave Stubley of the Lincolnshire Aircraft Recovery Group, Bill Welbourne of the Fenland and West Norfolk Aircraft Preservation Society, Nick Squires of 23 Squadron, Peter Montgomery and Simon Parry, all of whom have provided details that have enhanced the technical and human interest elements of a number of the incidents mentioned. I am grateful to C R Salewski MA, archivist of the Deutches Museum fur Luftschiffahrt und Marinefliegerei in Nordholz, Germany, for information and illustrations relating to WW1 Naval Zeppelin operations. Illustrations have come from many sources but I appreciate particular help received from Roy Bonser, Alec Brew, Peter Brooks, Robin Duke-Woolley, Ron Durand, Ken Ellis, Chris Goss, Peter Green, Mike Kelsey, Simon Parry, Winston Ramsey, Wilhelm Ratuszynski and E A Walker. However, the original ownership of some photographs remains obscure or has been unable to be established and I apologise for any credit omitted for this reason. Extracts from official documents appear by permission of the Controller HMSO and Crown copyright is acknowledged. Quotes from Bill Norman’s article in the December 2000 issue of Flypast are reproduced by permission of Key Publishing Ltd. Finally I am most grateful to John Davies and Louise Stanley of Grub Street, for giving me the opportunity to bring my project to life.

  Author’s note: Some combat reports consulted have been found to state range distances in yards while others have expressed them in feet. Although range measurements in feet appear in many reports where AI interceptions are involved, this practice is only evident in such reports from 1942 onwards. In the interests of consistency, in the narrative of this book range distances have been expressed in yards.

  CHAPTER 1

  Dangerous Moonlight

  Peering through the cockpit canopy of a Junkers Ju88, Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Heinrich Beul shifted uneasily, gripped his MG15 machine gun more tightly and tried to scan the blackness of the night sky with his eyes. Peering intently at two flickering cathode-ray tubes, Pilot Officer Yeomans, Royal Air Force, seated in the rear cockpit of a Beaufighter, was piercing that same blackness with his airborne radar. On a midsummer night in 1941 each had a scent of the other; each one was seeking a kill.

  In World War 2 the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, clustered round The Wash, were littered with airfields that made juicy targets for Luftwaffe raiders. For the Luftwaffe, the night fighter unit that evolved into Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 (NJG2) bore the brunt of the first phase of intruder missions that lasted until late 1941, scoring a considerable measure of success against operational units, while also disrupting the flying training programme on the RAF’s home territory. Furthermore, when the Luftwaffe’s daylight offensive in the south and east of England was finally broken, its attention turned to mounting a night bombing blitz across the United Kingdom that increased its intensity from September 1940. Thus, in addition to being an arena for night fighter versus intruder encounters, this three-dimensional corridor into the heart of England also became an aerial crossroads for elements of the German night bombing offensive directed, for example, against the industrial Midlands and North. It soon became apparent that the watery expanse of The Wash, pointing like a signpost to the heart of England, together with its sparsely populated fenlands, was a one hundred-mile passageway through which the Luftwaffe expected to fly with little interference into the industrial heartland – and indeed beyond. No doubt this same philosophy also appealed to RAF Bomber Command planners when they plotted routes into the German homeland across the Zuider Zee in Holland. Both combatants found, to their cost, that what began as a quiet back-door route became, instead, a killing ground for the night fighters of RAF Wittering and Digby Sectors.

  A clue to the Luftwaffe’s intentions was first discovered in the form of a navigational radio beam, oriented from east to west near Spalding, by the Wireless Intelligence Development Unit (WIDU), a special signals flight commanded by Sqn Ldr R Blucke, based at RAF Wyton on the southern edge of the region. Documents recovered from downed enemy aircraft, together with intercepted radio traffic, suggested the existence of such beams and WIDU was hastily established to conduct a detailed search of the airwaves. Equipped with radio receivers capable of monitoring signals around the 30-33 megacycle wavelength, the unit had three Avro Ansons to carry the sets and a team of specialist wireless operators to do the job. Success came quickly, for on June 21 1940, after only a handful of sorties, Anson pilot Flt Lt Hal Bufton and his Y-service radio operator Corporal Dennis Mackey located signals with the dot, dash and continuous tone characteristics of the German Lorenz blind-landing system, passing east/west one mile south of Spalding. Following the beam allowed them to detect a second beam intersecting the first at Beeston – right on track for the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factories in Derby! Later it was established that the first beam was being transmitted from Kleves on the Dutch border, while the second was believed t
o have originated in Bredstedt on the German-Danish border. Together they were part of a German air radio-navigation system used to guide bombers to their targets that became known by the code name Knickebein (Crooked Leg). The subsequent electronics war is the fascinating in-depth subject of several books and it is not intended to re-examine it here.

  This, then, was the stage on which the battle for control of the English night sky in World War 2 was acted out. Now we’ll take a look at some of the players in this deadly game in their various guises, to show what happened when the hunter got to grips with the hunted.

  Air cover against possible night bombing raids was spread thinly in the Midland region at the beginning of 1940 and it seemed as if the lessons of the last war had been forgotten. In order to appreciate how events unfold in this story, yet avoid becoming bogged down with the complexity of trying to follow operations by all the night fighter squadrons throughout the whole of the UK, the exploits of one unit – 23 Squadron – will be taken as representative of this particular period of the night air war. Night fighter squadrons, in the area of the country covered by this narrative, came under the control of 12 Group of Fighter Command, whose patch stretched across the heartland of England from The Wash to the Mersey and York to Birmingham. 23 Squadron was in RAF Wittering Sector.

  23, equipped with the Bristol Blenheim Mk I, had moved to RAF Wittering from RAF Northolt in May 1938 and thence to Collyweston, Wittering’s adjacent satellite field, also known as K3, from where, at the end of March 1940, it began night patrols. Initially five Blenheims were converted to Mark IF (fighter) version by the addition of a bolt-on under-belly tray containing four .303 inch calibre machine guns. This was in addition to a single forward-firing .303 machine gun fitted as standard in the wing root plus the dorsal turret gun.

  Right from the onset of war, a small number of 23 Squadron’s Blenheims, first one, then later two sections at a time, were detached to RAF Digby for a week in rotation, carrying out night readiness duty, standing patrols and searchlight cooperation sorties in that sector. Between October 1939 and January 1940, however, the Digby detachments had just two night scrambles, both of which proved fruitless.

  Early in 1940 the eminent scientist Dr E G ‘Taffy’ Bowen CBE FRS worked not only on the development and construction of the first practical airborne radar sets – generally referred to as Airborne Interception and abbreviated to AI – but, due to his direct involvement over several years, was also in a unique position to give much thought to the elementary theory of air interception tactics. His analysis showed that first:

  … a pursuing night fighter must have a speed advantage over its target. If the fighter were no faster than the target it would never catch it… if it went too fast it would overshoot. The optimum overtaking speed was about 20 to 25% greater than the aircraft being chased.

  Secondly:

  In order to have a reasonable chance of completing an interception, the night fighter must be placed within a cone of about 40 or 50° behind the raider and heading on a track not more than 30° different from the target. This presented a formidable task to the ground control as it existed at that time and was not solved until the appearance of special GCI equipment towards the end of 1940.

  While in approximate terms the maximum speed of a Blenheim was said to be as good as or better than its opponents – with the exception of the Junkers Ju88 – in reality, it had neither the sort of speed margin nor weight of firepower to deal with its opponents with ease. So, as will become apparent from many of the sorties described in this narrative, the Blenheim was often at a disadvantage. During those early days few airborne radar sets were available to install in Blenheims and it was not until late July 1940 that the first AI-assisted kill was achieved in the south of England. It was a slow old business though, with only eight enemy aircraft being claimed as shot down by AI-assisted Blenheims between August and November 1940.

  In the meantime 23 Squadron, having ended its detachments to Digby, was to meet with some small success over the Fenlands in June 1940. This was not without losses that in themselves highlight not only the tenacity and skill of the aircrews, but also the shortcomings of the Blenheim in this role.

  The night of June 18/19 1940 was a clear example of this, when the Luftwaffe mounted its first large scale night raid of the war on mainland British targets and over seventy enemy aircraft (E/A) struck at several towns, cities, airfields and rail targets across eastern and southern England, in addition to raids in other parts of the country.

  From its base at Collyweston, 23 Squadron was in action that night, deploying seven Blenheim Mk IF aircraft on night fighter patrols in the vicinity of The Wash. Similar patrols had been flown every night that month to date without sighting the enemy but this occasion was going to be a hot one. What transpired is an excellent illustration of night fighter operations based on ‘eyeball Mark One’ technology, prior to the advent of practical airborne radar – which itself was later made more effective by precision Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) techniques. The limitation of the human eye in such situations was summarised by a former AI operator, Sqn Ldr Lewis Brandon DSO DFC:

  On an average dark night the range at which a pilot could expect to see the bomber was between 1,000 and 1,500 feet. On a very dark night, without the benefit of starlight he might have to close in to 600 or 800 feet before the vital visual. Of course there were nights when visibility was exceptionally good and one might obtain a visual at 3,000 to 4,000 feet. This was usually in conditions of bright moonlight.

  The engagement by 23 Squadron illustrates – and certainly not for the last time – how confused a tactical situation could become, with several units and numerous individual aircraft all trying to tackle enemy aircraft in the dark. Furthermore, analysis of official documentation covering this action – and indeed various interpretations of it in a number of books and press articles in which it is mentioned – contain what can only be described as a trying amount of anomalies!

  Involved from the Thames to the Humber on this particular night for the RAF were 23, 29 and 604 Squadrons with Blenheims and 19, 66 and 74 Squadrons with Spitfires. The overall Luftwaffe raiding force was composed of Gruppen from Kampfgeschwader 4 (KG4) and KG27, but as the focus here is on 23 Squadron’s action around The Wash it would be the aircraft of KG4, operating from Merville and Lille-Roubaix, for whom places such as RAF Mildenhall, RAF Honington and RAF Marham were the primary objectives, that would clash with 23 Squadron that night.

  According to the Squadron Operational Record Book (RAF Form 540) Squadron Leader Joseph ‘Spike’ O’Brien in L8687, YP-X was the first aircraft away from Collyweston at 22.30 hours. Interestingly, his combat report is annotated – in different handwriting – that he left the ground at 00.30 hrs and there is a curious difference between his original take-off time and of those aircraft that followed. Tonight though, seated at his shoulder in the normally unoccupied navigator’s position was Pilot Officer Cuthbert King-Clarke, a new pilot being shown the ropes by his CO. Back in the turret was air gunner Corporal David Little. One explanation for the timing anomaly might be that since the sortie was primarily a familiarisation flight for King-Clarke it was combined with the regular evening standing patrol and that he probably returned to Wittering, possibly to refuel, before taking off again at 00.30 hours to join the action. While it is quite usual for a combat report to note time of take-off for the action being described, this does not mean that an ORB will necessarily reflect every event, nor guarantee its accuracy.

  However, once the raiders’ intentions became clearer, fighters across the east of England appear to have been ordered aloft from about 23.30 hours onwards. Six other Blenheims of A and B Flights left for their patrol lines at ten minute intervals. Sgt Alan Close, pilot, with his gunner LAC Laurence Karasek in L1458, YP-S, went off at 23.35, followed by Plt Off Aberconway Pattinson and air gunner Cpl William McAdam, in YP-U. Next up was Flt Lt Raymond Duke-Woolley in YP-L with AC2 Derek Bell in the turret. Plt Off Derek
Willans, Flt Lt Roland Knight and Fg Off Nelson Harding flew the remaining Blenheims. It is interesting to note that the ranks of the non-commissioned air gunners, ranging from AC2 to Sgt, are typical of that period and that it was not until later that few operational RAF aircrew held a rank below that of sergeant.

  Patrol lines were taken up on bearings fanning out eastwards from Wittering and it was Sgt Close who made the first interception in the vicinity of King’s Lynn. Searchlights in The Wash belt picked out some of the raiders and initially this helped the Blenheim crews. Caught in the beam of one searchlight was a Heinkel He111.

  It should not be overlooked that searchlights played an important role in support of night fighter operations – as well as AA guns – by not only locating enemy aircraft, indicating their courses and allowing their altitude to be judged, but also by providing this visual information instantly. While it is clear from some combat reports that night fighter crews occasionally cursed overzealous searchlights, in the main the searchlights and fighters worked effectively together. Realisation of their true value to the fighters brought a reorganisation at the start of 1942, when searchlights were placed in geographical ‘boxes’ patrolled by night fighters.

  Close and Karasek exchanged gunfire with the enemy aircraft but the Blenheim lacked both the speed and firepower to kill at a relatively safe distance. Their Blenheim too was lit up by the searchlight glare and it was the enemy gunners who got the better of this exchange. A burst of gunfire from the Heinkel shattered the cockpit, probably wounding or even killing Sgt Close because the aircraft immediately dived out of control and crashed into Chapel Road, Terrington St Clement. LAC Karasek was fortunate indeed to bale out and landed safely nearby. Away to his north Sqn Ldr O’Brien saw an aircraft fall in flames in the vicinity of King’s Lynn – Close’s aircraft – and further confirmation of the incident is noted in the RAF Sutton Bridge ORB – at that time home to 6 OTU – which reads as follows.