official communique was not issued until seven months later), which revealed to the air force and the government the dangerous inadequacies of the country’s air defences. On the same day as the ‘Barking Creek’ episode, Brian Kingcome was with 65 Squadron patrolling at 5,000 feet over the Thames. Every time they passed over the Isle of Sheppey, anti-aircraft guns opened up, even though the undersides of their Spitfires were painted black and white to identify them as friendly. A signal was sent to the batteries telling them to hold their fire, but it did not stop one aeroplane being hit in the wing and fuselage.
The basic problem was one of identification. The aircraft that sparked the panic on 6 September was, according to Dowding, carrying refugees from Holland. Other accounts say it was a Blenheim returning from a patrol over the North Sea, or an Anson from Coastal Command. Unless air traffic could be quickly and accurately recognized as friend or enemy, the potential for disaster was enormous. The problem had already been solved by a system called IFF (Identification Friend or Foe), a transmitter which sent back an amplified signal that established an aircraft’s innocent intentions when picked up in a radar beam. But none of the Spitfires or Hurricanes chasing each other around the Thames estuary had yet been fitted with it. After the incident the installation programme was belatedly speeded up, so that by June 1940 it was standard equipment on every fighter.
The fiasco concentrated minds. Al Deere, who was with 54 Squadron at Hornchurch, noted that ‘on five out of my next six training flights I was engaged on tactical exercises in cooperation with the control and reporting organization’. In retrospect he felt that some good had come out of ‘this truly amazing shambles’. It was, he thought, ‘just what was needed to iron out some of the many snags which existed…and to convince those who were responsible that a great deal of training of controllers, plotters and radar operators, all of whom had been hastily drafted in on the first emergency call-up, was still required before the system could be considered in any way reliable’.6
The mechanisms for identifying and reporting the approach of enemy aircraft, and the command and control structure to counter their attacks, would be refined and tested in the relative quiet of the winter and spring. Radar was at the heart of the system. It was based on the discovery that solid objects reflected radio waves. A projected radio signal, on encountering the metal skin of an aircraft, bounced back and registered as a blip on a cathode-ray tube. The military potential was obvious and the United States, Japan and, above all, Germany worked on applications throughout the 1930s.
Britain got radar late but it had recovered lost time and by the onset of the war was protected by two chains of transmitters covering the upper and lower airspace of the island’s eastern and southern approaches. The twenty stations, with their mysterious 350-feet-high transmitters and 240-feet receivers, could locate aircraft a hundred miles away and give an approximate idea of direction, height and numbers. With radar, the historical defensive advantage given to Britain by the sea extended to the air. It was particularly effective over large expanses of water where there was no confusing ‘clutter’. Even so it was to remain, for several years, an inexact science.
The electronic information pulsing on the cathode-ray tubes under the intense gaze of the Waafs, who were the most expert operators, was supplemented by the eyes and ears of the spotters of the Observer Corps. These were volunteers who squatted in sandbagged posts, equipped with binoculars, aircraft identification pamphlets and a crude altitude measuring instrument, trying to track enemy aeroplanes as they droned overhead. The blurred picture provided by the two was brought into sharper focus after passing through the filter room at Bentley Priory, an eighteenth-century Gothic mansion in Stanmore on the north-west edge of London, where Dowding and Fighter Command had their headquarters. There the reports were interpreted in the light of other data, and the distances of incoming aircraft reported by neighbouring radar stations subjected to a calculation known as ‘range cutting’ to provide a more accurate idea of their course.
The graded information was now transferred on to a map with red counters representing enemy aeroplanes and black counters friendly ones. The information was passed on to the operations rooms at each level of the chain of command – sector, group and Fighter Command HQ – where it was translated on to identical map tables. The development of a raid was watched by the controller and his staff from a balcony. The resources at hand to deal with the intruders were indicated on a large board rigged with coloured bulbs, which showed which squadrons would be available in thirty minutes, which were at five minutes’ readiness, which were at two minutes’ readiness and which were already in the air.
Fighter Command had a simple pyramid command structure, with Dowding, in Bentley Priory, at the top. One step down were the group commanders, each presiding over one of the four quadrants into which Britain’s air defence had been divided. The south-west, and half of Wales, were covered by 10 Group, the middle segment of England and Wales by 12 Group, and Scotland and the far North by 13 Group. No. 11 Group, with responsibility for London and the south-east corner of England, was the busiest. Each group was subdivided into sectors that centred on a main fighter base, supplemented by a number of satellite aerodromes.
Raids fell naturally into one or another group’s area of activity. When enemy aircraft were reported, the duty controller in the group operations room, in consultation with the group commander, decided which sector would deal with it and which aircraft would be ‘scrambled’. Control of the fighters then passed to the sector controller, whose task was to manoeuvre his aircraft into the best position to intercept the raiders. He was helped in this by the IFF reports, which allowed him to keep track of his assets. The signal – ‘Tally Ho!’ – from the squadron or flight commander, meant that the enemy had been sighted and battle was about to be joined. At this point control of events passed to the pilots.
Orders and information were passed down the command chain and from pilot to pilot in a code that was very soon to enter public parlance and the popular imagination. The enemy were ‘bandits’ (the Germans called them Indianer – ‘indians’). ‘Angels’ indicated altitude, so that ‘Angels fifteen’ meant 15,000 feet. ‘Pancake’ was an order to come back and land. ‘Vector’, plus a number indicating geometric degrees, gave the course a pilot was to steer. ‘Buster’ meant flat out. The trusty clock system – ‘bandits at ten o’clock’ – devised on the Western Front, provided an accurate fix on where the trouble was located.
The prevailing jumpiness of the first weeks of the war was partly because few of those involved in air defence had any clear idea of what to expect. The experience of Poland had suggested a blitzkrieg, sudden and pitiless, in which virtually everything was vulnerable. In fact the first German target was logical and conventional: the British Home Fleet, tucked away in the estuaries and anchorages of Scotland, from where it could menace Germany and its navy in relative security. On the morning of 16 October, twelve Junkers 88 fast bombers set off from Westerland on the Island of Sylt just off the Danish coast to attack shipping at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth on the north side of the Firth of Forth. The first group arrived at 2.30 in the afternoon, taking anti-aircraft gunners south of the Forth Bridge – just east of the base – by surprise. The main target was the battleship HMS Hood, but to the disappointment of the raiders it was in dry dock. Hitler, apparently anxious to avoid civilian casualties while there was still a chance of a settlement with Britain, had ordered that only ships on the water could be attacked.
Two targets presented themselves: the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Edinburgh, riding at anchor on the eastern side of the bridge. The Junkers were each carrying two 500-kg bombs. At 2,500 feet, several of them dived on the vessels and released their loads. Both ships were hit, but the bombs failed to do significant damage. Ten men were injured, none fatally.
The anti-aircraft batteries now opened up, joined by fire from the cruisers, which had previously been ordered to engage aircraft only if they proved hostile, presumably a precaution taken to counter the reckless gunnery of the first weeks. The action took place on the doorsteps of two RAF stations. Turnhouse, the home of 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, just to the south of the Forth Bridge, and Drem, where 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron was based. The raid was already several minutes old before Spitfires were in the air. As the bombers headed for home, they were chased out to sea. One was caught by three