in small groups in the sun on the east side of the aerodrome at North Weald in Essex, listening to radios powered by outsize batteries. Earlier the squadron adjutant had distributed blue will forms to be filled in. ‘There were great roars of laughter,’ remembered Peter Down, a twenty-three-year-old who had joined eighteen months before. ‘All we had to leave really were our golf clubs and tennis rackets and things. We had the odd car and there were shouts of, “Who wants my Lagonda?” or, “Who wants my clubs?” We left them to each other.’45
Not everyone was so light-hearted. Brian Kingcome was struck by the flatness of the address, devoid of drama or tension, ‘just this, sorrowful defeated voice going on’. He looked around at his companions in the hangar office in Hornchurch, ‘thinking to myself, probably the whole lot of us will be dead in three weeks…No sooner had Chamberlain finished his speech on the radio than we expected to hear the murmur of hordes of German bombers approaching and that became the norm at dispersal for a while.’46
The war began in a flurry of false alarms. Air-raid sirens sounded almost immediately after Chamberlain’s Sunday broadcast, sending civilians hurrying to the shelters. But no Germans came. The defenders were eager for action and trigger-happy. Three days after the declaration of war, a searchlight battery on Mersea Island in the Blackwater estuary spotted what was thought to be a hostile aircraft crossing the Channel coast. This exciting news was passed on to the Northolt headquarters of 11 Group, which covered the south-east of England. They, in turn, ordered the local sector controllers at North Weald to send up fighters to investigate. Hurricanes from 56 Squadron took off from North Weald aerodrome and climbed through the mist into the clear morning sky to hunt for the intruders. As they did so, their traces were picked up by the radar station at Canewdon, on the muddy tongue of Essex that sticks out between the Crouch and Thames estuaries. Even now, the cause of the tragic fiasco that followed is not entirely clear. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the Fighter Command chief, said later that the equipment was faulty and the baffle designed to block out electronic echoes from the landward side was not functioning, though this was disputed. To the operators it seemed they had located a big enemy formation coming in over the sea. More fighters were scrambled to deal with the apparent threat, and they in turn registered on the screen and added to the thickening confusion. Among them were twelve Spitfires from 74 Squadron at Hornchurch. ‘A’ Flight, commanded by Adolph Malan, took off first. He led one section of three aircraft. Flying Officer ‘Paddy’ Byrne, an experienced, Irish-born pilot with a reputation for eccentricity, led another. In the adrenaline-charged atmosphere, chaos, then catastrophe, ensued.
Pilot Officer John Freeborn, barely out of Leeds Grammar School but well-freighted with Yorkshire obstinacy, was directly behind Byrne. ‘It was a very misty morning but it was a beautiful day,’ he said. ‘I remember looking down and seeing we had cut a line through the haze where we had taken off. Malan was well in front…We saw these aircraft and Malan gave the order: “Number One attack – go!” They made an attack at these aircraft and then pulled away. And so we went and attacked.’1
The combat was only too successful. Freeborn, Byrne and the third man in the section, Sergeant Pilot John Flinders, swooped down in line astern. Freeborn and Byrne opened fire and saw two aircraft go down trailing smoke. Freeborn felt ‘exhilarated’ at their success. On the way back to Hornchurch he saw what he thought was a Luftwaffe bomber and was about to attack when Flinders yelled a warning on the R/T that it was in fact a friendly Blenheim. On landing he was met by his commanding officer, Squadron Leader George Sampson, and told that the aircraft he and Byrne had disposed of were Hurricanes from 56 Squadron. Pilot Officer Montague Hulton-Harrop was dead. He was nineteen years old, a newcomer to the squadron and ‘tall, fair-haired and eager’, according to Eric Clayton, a ground-crew member who maintained his machine. Pilot Officer Tommy Rose survived and showed up later in the day.2
Freeborn was appalled. He tried to find Malan, but he had ‘done a bunk completely. Never saw him.’ He and Byrne were put under arrest. ‘I was sent to my room with a bloke from 54 Squadron to guard me…I was eighteen years old, frightened to bloody death.’3 Coming soon after an incident when he had been severely reprimanded for landing with the undercarriage of his Spitfire up, Freeborn assumed his RAF career was over. The affair was particularly agonizing because, as squadron adjutant, he had previously distributed orders to the pilots telling them under no circumstances to shoot at single-engined planes. The instruction was based on the calculation that no Luftwaffe fighter had the range to reach Britain and that any single-engined machine was bound to be friendly. The speed with which Freeborn forgot the order was proof of the disorienting power of the heat of the moment. Al Deere, who was also scrambled that morning, had felt it too. ‘We were all keyed up,’ he said. ‘You didn’t think about the fact that a 109 could never have got as far as England from the then borders of Germany.’4
A general court martial was set for 7 October. Sampson, ‘an absolute toff’ according to Freeborn, put the pair in touch with Sir Patrick Hastings, an intelligence officer at Fighter Command HQ at Stanmore, who had been a leading QC in peacetime. Hastings agreed to act as prisoners’ friend and told them to speak to Roger Bushell, another well-known figure at the London bar who was now commanding 600 (City of London) Auxiliary Squadron at Biggin Hill. Bushell, whose charm and indomitable nature made him one of the best-liked men in the air force, agreed to act as junior to Hastings. The proceedings were held at Stan-more and have never been made public. Freeborn claims Malan denied ever giving the order to attack. The defence argued that the case should never have been brought. After about an hour the four-man tribunal, led by the Judge Advocate, acquitted the two. It was the start of a long-running enmity in 74 Squadron. ‘From then on,’ Freeborn said, ‘Malan and I never got on.’
‘Sailor’ Malan had already established himself as a formidable personality. He was short, with fair hair, blazing blue eyes and a square, impassive face and cleft chin. He was coming up to twenty-nine, considerably older than most of the other pilots. He had done much in a hard life, and spoken little. Adolph Gysbert Malan was born within sight of Table Mountain in Cape Province and brought up on a farm near the small town of Slent. As a child he roamed the veldt with a shotgun, developing a marksman’s eye that would serve him well in the war. Aged fourteen he was sent off to a maritime college on board the training ship General Botha. The regime was spartan, the bullying institutionalized and the discipline harsh, bordering on the sadistic. Smoking was punished by six strokes of the lash. The victim was first certified as medically fit enough to withstand the punishment. He was ordered to strip to ‘No. 1 Duck Trousers’ – shorts – and given a rubber disc to bite on. Then he was stretched over a table in the recreation room and roped down to a ring bolt while the punishment was administered in public.
Malan once said: ‘The first time I saw this punishment handed out it was to a big chap – an Old Salt (as the senior cadets were known). It was quite a shock to see him break down. Later on I understood why.’ Freeborn had seen the scars from the whippings on Malan’s back. His biographer wrote that ‘in talks with Sailor, during which he described incidents infinitely more dramatic and perilous than anything that happened aboard the Botha, I never saw him more emotionally stirred than when he recalled the ceremony of being tied down and thrashed. The memory of it stayed with him vividly as a deed of outrage, an invasion of pride and privacy that helped to fashion a kind of stoicism that became an armour plating for the strenuous days to come.’ The experience also made him reluctant, ‘in later years, to join in the horseplay of RAF squadron initiating customs’.5
The 6 September débâcle was inscribed in RAF folklore as the Battle of Barking Creek, a reference to a nearby landmark which was a joke location beloved