Spitfire Pilot: A Personal Account of the Battle of Britain

by David M. Crook

I don’t know whether many people yet realize fully the great strategical advantages gained by Germany through her occupation of the Low Countries and France.

Hitherto, the Germans had been forced to fly big distances in order to reach this country, whereas we possessed advanced bases in France from which it was only a short flight into the heart of the enemy industrial areas. But we never used these advantages when they were in

our grasp, and for the first eight months of the war, there was no bombing of lan...

When the big German attack was launched in the west, the tables were turned immediately. We lost our advanced bas...

Anyway, as it turned out, even their escorting fighters did not manage to save the bombers, and large numbers were shot down.

At this time we were still working under an arrangement whereby we lived at our base and spent every third day down at the advanced base. We took it in turns with two other squadrons.

In the next week or two we flew up to London almost every day, sometimes twice a day, in order to give the overworked London squadrons a helping hand. They certainly needed it; the weight and intensity of these raids exceeded anything ever seen before. Day after day great masses of German bombers with enormous fighter escorts tried to battle their way through to the capital. Sometimes they were beaten back, sometimes a number of the bombers got through, always they suffered terrible losses. Day after day, battles of incredible ferocity were taking place, often at a height of five or six miles, and the great conflict raged and thundered through the summer skies of southern England. Many hundreds of German bombers and fighters littered the fields and countryside, and yet each morning brought a fresh wave of enemy aircraft, manned by crews who generally

showed a fine determination and doggedness in the face of such murderous losses.

The strain on everybody ...

Command was very heavy indeed during this period. There were so many attacks to meet and so few pilots to do it — only a few hundred of us in all, and on many occasions only about half that number were actually engaged. A number of these pilots had only just arrived in squadrons to replace the losses...

in Fighter Command had be...

and now, half-way through September, there were not many left of those who had started the summer’s fighting. I think the death of one experienced pilot was a bigger loss to a squadron in those days than ten Spitfires or Hurricanes, because however many fighters we lost or damaged, replacements always turned up immediately. This must have demanded the most terrific efforts from both the...

experienced pilots could never be replaced. You could only train the new ones as best you could, keep them out of trouble as much as possible in the air, and hope they would live long e...

The Germans were now making some very heavy attacks on our fighter stations, and many aerodromes were bombed till hardly a building of any importance was left standing, yet they continued to function at full operatio...

pilots in a matter of a few days and had to be withdrawn in order to be rested and reformed. To many pilots in the London squadrons, the strain at times must have seemed almost unbearable, and yet everybody held out, badly outnumbered though they were, and at the end of ...

In this prolonged and bitter encounter, it was certainly the R.A.F. who

pounded the longest — and the hardest.

Certainly, after the offensive had been in progress for a few weeks, enemy bombers showed a much greater tendency to jettison their bombs and turn back when attacked, and this was a great contrast to their earlier showing, when attacks were usually pressed home with the utmost determination.

I remember walking into the mess for lunch and sitting down and suddenly recollecting that at breakfast, only a few hours before, I had sat next to Mick at this very table and we had chatted together. And now, here we were at the next meal, everything quite normal, and he was dead.

That was the one thing I could never get accustomed to; seeing one’s

friends gay and full of life as they always were, and then, a few hours later, seeing the batman start packing their kit, their shaving brush still damp from being used that morning, while the owner was lyi...