Valcourt Roe, had also been killed over Namur. These encounters drastically increased the bombers’ vulnerability when they arrived over target. Of the twenty-three Battles that set out, only nine returned and five out of the eight Blenheims were lost.
The day saw the heaviest casualties Fighter Command had yet suffered. Fifteen pilots were killed and two so badly wounded that they subsequently died. Twenty-seven Hurricanes were shot down, most of them by Messerschmitts. The dead ranged from beginners like Flying Officer Gerald Cuthbert and Flight Lieutenant John Sullivan, who had arrived the day before, to some of the most seasoned pilots. Among the latter was Les Clisby and Lawrie Lorimer of 1 Squadron, who had set off at breakfast time from Berry-au-Bac with Prosser Hanks and Boy Mould to chase a large formation of Me 110s which had appeared overhead. On first seeing them, their inclination had been to leave them alone, but they were spurred into action by a fitter who urged them to set off in pursuit for the honour of the squadron.
Clisby was last seen going into a dive, the cockpit of his Hurricane belching smoke and flame after having apparently been hit by a cannon shell. No one saw what happened to Lorimer, who also went down. At first they were posted missing. But when there was no news, the other pilots anticipated the worst. Clisby’s unquenchable willingness to attack had persuaded Richey that he had ‘bought it’. Some time later French troops discovered two burned-out Hurricanes.
Clisby was a month short of his twenty-sixth birthday. The premature worry lines scoring his forehead made him look older. He had a square, heavy jaw, a wiry moustache and downward sloping humorous eyes. He was extrovert, profane, perpetually cheerful and addicted to flying. He had joined the Royal Australian Air Force as a cadet aged twenty-one, and after being awarded a permanent commission he volunteered to go to Britain in 1937, despite the talk of war. He had turned out to be the most effective of the squadron’s pilots, destroying at least nine German aircraft in his time in France, and he died not knowing he had just been awarded the DFC. Lorimer had been posted to 1 Squadron from 87 Squadron and had a reputation for being unlucky. This was the third time he had been shot down in five days.
The losses prompted a debate among the pilots about whether they could continue flying and fighting with such intensity. Pilots were carrying out as many as five sorties a day, of one and a half hours each, against forces that always vastly outnumbered them, taking off from often primitive airfields that were subjected to regular bombardment. Despite the danger, the privations and the exhaustion, morale and the will to engage the Germans remained largely intact. On the evening of 14 May, Flying Officer Frank Joyce and Pilot Officer Chris Mackworth of 87 Squadron were sent off on a reconnaissance mission over Louvain. Mackworth’s engine would not start, so Joyce went alone. On the way he ran into a large formation of Me 110s and immediately launched a single-handed attack which he sustained until he was wounded in the leg and had to crash-land. He was rescued by some Scottish soldiers and treated at a field hospital, but had to be constantly shifted as the Germans advanced. Gangrene set in and his leg was amputated.
Mackworth had eventually managed to get his aeroplane started and set off on his mission. He also ran into Me 110s while they were strafing a village close to a tented field hospital, attacked them despite their overwhelming numbers and was shot down. He managed to bale out, but his parachute caught fire and when soldiers found him he was dead. His friend Dennis David received a letter later from Mackworth’s father ‘to tell me that he had heard from one of the doctors at the hospital. They had buried Chris but had no means of marking his grave other than by writing his name on a piece of paper which they put in a beer bottle on top of it.’12
Despite the remarkable mental and physical robustness of the British fighter pilots, fear and exhaustion began to take their toll. Richey, who was sustained by a buoyant reservoir of optimism, admitted that by now ‘our nerves were getting somewhat frayed and we were jumpy and morose. Few of the boys smiled now – we were no longer the merry band of days gone by.’ After his first parachute jump he had already begun ‘to feel peculiar. I had a hell of a headache and was jumpy and snappy. Often I dared not speak for fear of bursting into tears.’13
There was to be no lessening of pressure on the pilots in the days to come. On 15 May the French government understood that the Battle of France was lost. This realization did not prevent a passionate request for more fighters. Churchill was woken at 7.30 a.m. by a call from the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who ‘evidently under stress’ announced in English: ‘We have been defeated,’ and informed him the front line at Sedan had been broken. Churchill candidly recorded that, to his mind, shaped as it was by the memory of the previous war, ‘the idea of the line being broken, even on a broad front, did not convey…the appalling consequences that flowed from it’.14 When Reynaud went on to beg for ten fighter squadrons, he was prepared to at least consider the plea.
The request was placed on the agenda of that morning’s War Cabinet meeting as the second item. Dowding was present and spoke forcefully to bury a proposal Churchill had already backed away from and which had little or no support elsewhere. It was decided that the prime minister inform Reynaud that ‘no further fighter squadrons should for the present be sent to France’.
Dowding understood, though, that the reprieve was likely to be only temporary. Sure enough, the following day, 16 May, his superior, Sir Cyril Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, decided himself that eight flights – the equivalent of four squadrons – should be detached from Fighter Command and sent to France. His initiative followed a conversation with the BAFF commander, Air Marshal Barratt, who had emphasized the terrible fatigue the fighter pilots were now suffering, and additional plans were made for twenty exhausted men to be rotated out for a rest and replaced with experienced pilots from home squadrons.
Churchill, whose attitude towards the expenditure of fighter reserves chopped and changed with the demands of the hour, agreed and the decision was taken at that morning’s War Cabinet meeting. It was not to end there. In the afternoon Churchill flew to Paris, where the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to him. He met Reynaud, his minister of national defence, Alain Daladier, and General Gamelin at the Quai d’Orsay with the smoke hanging in the air from piles of documents being burned in the garden in anticipation of the arrival of the Germans. Commanders and politicians radiated defeat and dejection while simultaneously appealing for yet more British aeroplanes.
Churchill’s earlier pragmatism was overwhelmed by a romantic desire ‘to give the last chance to the French army to rally its bravery and strength’. With an eye on posterity he also calculated that ‘it would not be good historically if their request were denied and their ruin resulted’. The telegram containing these thoughts was sent to the Cabinet, which agreed to send six more Hurricane squadrons to France. The practical difficulties of housing them on battered and vulnerable airfields meant that in fact the squadrons – the last remaining Hurricane units not to have contributed to the French campaign – remained based in England. The plan was that each morning three would fly over to a French airfield and operate there until the afternoon, when the other three would relieve them.
The effect was to reduce further what Dowding, in agreement with the Air Ministry, had set as the minimum number of fighters and pilots needed to defend the country. He had already opposed the earlier decision to send eight flights to France in a letter to the Air Council, reminding them ‘that the last estimate which they made as to the force necessary to defend this country was fifty-two squadrons, and my strength has now been reduced to the equivalent of thirty-six squadrons’. He closed by demanding that the ministry decide what level of fighter strength was to be left for the defence of the country and to assure him that, when that was reached, ‘not a single fighter will be sent across the Channel however urgent and insistent the appeals for help may be’.
All along the front the French were now in panicky retreat and the fighter squadrons were dragged along with them. At dawn on 17 May Halahan and the 1 Squadron pilots received orders to move immediately from Berry-au-Bac to Condé-sur-Mame, between Reims and Paris. Before leaving they destroyed two Hurricanes damaged beyond immediate repair by pushing them into a shell crater and setting them on fire. Many of the fighters lost in France were