Wings

The RAF at War, 1912-2012

Patrick Bishop

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857899811
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Royal Air Force is synonymous with its heroic achievements in the summer of 1940, when Winston Churchill's 'famous few' - the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots of RAF Fighter Command - held Goering's Luftwaffe at bay in the Battle of Britain, thereby changing the course of the war. For much of the twentieth century, warplanes were fixed in the world's imagination, a symbol of the perils and excitements of the modern era. But within the space of a hundred years, military aviation has morphed from the exotic to the mundane. An activity which was charged with danger - the domain of the daring - is now carried out by computers and pilotless drones.

Aviators have always seemed different to soldiers and sailors - more adventurous, questing and imaginative. Their stories gripped the public and in both wars and air aces dominated each side's propaganda, capturing hearts and dreams. Writing with the verve, passion and the sheer narrative aplomb familiar to many thousands of readers from his bestselling Second World War aerial histories, Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, Patrick Bishop's Wings is a rich and compelling account of military flying from its heroic early days to the present.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface: The Last Dogfight

1 Pilots of the Purple Twilight

2 A Wing and a Prayer

3 Archie

4 The New Front Line

5 Death, Drink, Luck

6 The Third Service

7 Jonah’s Gourd

8 Arming for Armageddon

9 Into Battle

10 Apotheosis

11 Flying Blind

12 Seabirds

13 Wind, Sand and Stars

14 No Moon Tonight

15 Air Supremacy

16 Jet

17 ‘Fox Two Away!’

18 Per Ardua ad Astra

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

A Note on the Author

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Ernest Bishop, courtesy of the author.

1. Lanoe Hawker, VC. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

2. Oswald Boelcke. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

3. Albert Ball, VC. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

4. Short ‘Folder’ seaplane. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

5. Royal Aircraft Factory BE2Cs. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

6. De Havilland DH2. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

7. James McCudden VC. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

8. Members of 85 Squadron. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

9. Sopwith Camel. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

10. Edwin Dunning’s Sopwith Pup. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

11. Aerial policing over Iraq. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

12. Hendon Air Pageant. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

13. Mick Mannock. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

14. Brian Kingcome. Courtesy Imperial War Museum.

15. Roland Beaumont. Courtesy Imperial War Museum.

16. Keith Park. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

17. Guy Gibson, VC. Courtesy Imperial War Museum.

18. Peter Hill. Courtesy Imperial War Museum.

19. WAAF mechanics. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

20. Handley Page Halifax. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

21. Hugh Dowding. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

22. ‘Boom’ Trenchard. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

23. Pilots of 66 Squadron. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

24. RAF college, Cranwell. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

25. Sergeant pilots put their feet up. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

26. Pilots of the Free French 340 Squadron. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

27. Battle over Britain. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

28. George Beurling. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

29. Spitfires of 241 Squadron. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

30. Hawker Typhoon. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

31. DH Mosquito B1V. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

32. Lancaster Bomber. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

33. Lockheed of Central Command’s 224 Squadron. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

34. A Glosser Meteor. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

35. A Sea Harrier. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

36. An Avro Vulcan. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

37. A Tornado fighter jet. Courtesy Philip Jarrett.

Preface

The Last Dogfight

The encounter lasted little more than three minutes. It took place in the violet-blue skies of a midwinter dusk, over the Falkland Islands, 8,000 miles from Britain. It happened more than thirty years ago and it is very unlikely that anything like it will happen again.

On 8 June 1982, at 3.50 p.m. local time, a Sea Harrier fighter jet piloted by Flight Lieutenant David Morgan took off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, on station about ninety miles north-east of Port Stanley, the capital of East Falkland. Another Sea Harrier, with Lieutenant Dave Smith at the controls, followed two minutes later. The pair set course for Choiseul Sound, the sea channel separating a stretch of wilderness called Lafonia from the rest of East Falkland, where they were to mount a CAP – a combat air patrol.

Earlier in the day two ships moving soldiers forward for the final assault on Port Stanley had been attacked by Argentine air force jets while the troops waited to disembark. There were no aeroplanes to protect them and no missile batteries in place. The bombs killed more than fifty men. CAPs had been flown over the areas since the catastrophe. While there was still light there was still time for another Argentinian attack.

As Morgan approached the scree-covered hillsides of the island, which were turning purple in the setting sun, he saw ‘a huge vertical column of oily black smoke’ rising from the bay at Fitzroy settlement, where the stricken ships lay. The rescue operation was still under way and landing craft crawled back and forth, loaded with wounded. Morgan wrote later that he was ‘gripped by an awful sense of foreboding’.¹

The two jets settled into a pattern, ploughing a parallel furrow a couple of miles above the scene, cruising at 240 knots (276 mph), flying for ten minutes into the sunset, then turning back again. Sea Harriers were equipped with Blue Fox radar for looking downwards. It was designed for use over the Arctic Ocean against the Soviet air force but over land it was ‘useless’. Instead the pair relied on their eyes. The dusk was in layers, shading from light to dark as it neared the earth’s surface. Staring into it was tiring. After a few minutes both pilots began to experience ‘empty field myopia’, losing their middle and long-range vision. Morgan and Smith fought it by focussing on each other, then on their forward radar screens, before resuming their visual search.

As they headed west along Choiseul Sound Morgan noticed a small landing craft making its way eastwards. He radioed the air controller aboard one of the ships in the area, who told him it was a ‘friendly’, transporting troops to the inlet at Bluff Cove, further up the coast. As he passed it on each leg of the patrol he looked down and ‘imagined the crew, cold and tired in their tiny boat and . . . wondered if they had any idea we were watching over them.’

For forty minutes they flew back and forth, nursing their fuel, not talking, ‘both feeling a burgeoning impotence’ at their detachment from the scene below. At about 4.40 p.m. Morgan made another turn to the west and checked his fuel gauge. He had four minutes flying time left before he would have to head back to the mother ship, Hermes. The landing craft was still butting eastwards, with white water breaking over its bow.

Then Morgan noticed a shape emerging out of the dying light of the western sky.

‘A mere mile to the east of the tiny vessel was the camouflaged outline of a . . . fighter, hugging the sea and heading directly for the landing craft, which had become a very personal part of my experience for the last forty minutes,’ he remembered later.

He jammed open the throttle lever, shouted to Smith to follow him down and pushed his Harrier into a sixty-degree dive as the air-speed indicator shot up from 240 to more than 600 knots. As they hurtled downwards the jet closed on the landing craft. It was a delta-winged A-4 Skyhawk, and he watched it open fire, ‘bracketing the tiny matchbox of a craft’ with 20 mm cannon fire. Then a dark shape detached from the wing. Morgan was relieved to see the bomb explode at least a hundred feet beyond the vessel. But then he saw another A-4 running in behind the first attacker. The second pilot did not miss and he watched ‘the violent, fire-bright petals of the explosion, which obliterated the stern’.

Morgan felt rage grip him. ‘All-consuming anger welled in my throat,’ he recalled, ‘and I determined, in that instant, that this pilot was going to die.’

It seemed to him that ‘the world suddenly became very quiet. I was completely focused and was acutely aware that this was the moment for which all my training had prepared me.’

He had flown many hours of mock-combat, but never encountered a real enemy. He hauled his Harrier down and behind the second Argentinian. Edging into his peripheral vision on the left, he suddenly picked up another Skyhawk skimming low over the wave-tops. He decided to go for this one first. He ‘rolled out less than half a mile behind the third fighter, closing like a runaway train’.

The radar that detected targets and relayed them to the ‘head-up display’ (HUD) beamed onto the cockpit windscreen. As it picked up the aircraft an electronic pulse sounded in Morgan’s earphones that became an ‘urgent, high-pitched chirp’ when it located the heat of the Skyhawk’s engine. This was the signal for the pilot to lock on the Sidewinder.

‘My right thumb pressed the lock button on the stick and instantly the small green missile cross in the HUD transformed itself into a diamond sitting squarely over the back end of the Skyhawk,’ Morgan remembered. The weapon was ready to fire.

‘I raised the safety catch and mashed the red, recessed firing button with all the strength I could muster.’ There was a fractional delay as the missile’s thermal battery ignited. Then ‘the Sidewinder was transformed from an inert, eleven-feet-long drainpipe into a living, fire-breathing monster as it accelerated to nearly three times the speed of sound and streaked towards the enemy aircraft.’

The shock of the departing missile flung Morgan’s aircraft onto his starboard wing-tip. As he righted the Harrier, he saw the missile racing for the Skyhawk’s flaming jet pipe, ‘leaving a white corkscrew of smoke against the slate grey sea’. After two seconds ‘what had been a living, vibrant flying machine was completely obliterated as the missile tore into its vitals and ripped it apart.’ The pilot, Ensign Alfredo Vazquez, ‘had no chance of survival and within a further two seconds the ocean had swallowed all trace of him and his aeroplane as if they had never been’.

There was no time for reflection. Another target was directly in front of him, only a mile away. It was the Skyhawk which had bombed the landing craft and it was turning to the left. Morgan locked on and fired. The jet was flown by Lieutenant Juan Arrarás. He seemed to realize the mortal danger behind him and swung hard to the right, forcing the missile to reverse its course. It made no difference. The Sidewinder closed on the Skyhawk, impacting behind the cockpit in a flash of white light.

‘The air was filled with the aluminium confetti of destruction, fluttering seawards,’ Morgan wrote. ‘I watched, fascinated, as the disembodied cockpit yawed rapidly starboard through ninety degrees and splashed violently into the freezing water.’ At that moment ‘a parachute snapped open, right in front of my face’.

Arrarás had managed to eject from the disembodied cockpit. He ‘flashed over my left wing, so close that I saw every detail of the rag-doll figure, its arms and legs thrown into a grotesque star shape by the deceleration of the silk canopy’. Morgan felt a flash of ‘relief and empathy’ for his enemy, then concentrated on his next target.

Both his missiles were gone. That left the Harrier’s two 30 mm guns. What he took to be the last remaining Skyhawk was ahead of him. He lifted the safety slide on the trigger. The head-up display had disappeared from the windscreen and he had only his own skill and eyesight to rely on when taking aim. As he closed on the Skyhawk it ‘broke rapidly towards me. I pulled the blurred outline to the bottom of the blan...