‘fighter boys’, who lived for the shining hour, who did not take themselves seriously.’21
The attitude cultivated by fighter pilots from the first days on the Western Front had been hedonistic, light-hearted, little concerned with events outside their world. This was to some extent genuine, to some extent affectation. Nobody now could be indifferent to what was happening in Europe. A number of the pilots had first-hand knowledge of the rise of fascism from time spent on the Continent. James Sanders, who was brought up in Italy, had once at the age of nine sung, with the school choir, the slaves’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco in front of Mussolini himself. This encounter had induced no sentiments of respect. Later he got into trouble at school for using squares of newspaper, bearing the Duce’s photograph, as lavatory paper. Billy Drake had been sent by his father, first to a German-speaking, then to a French-speaking school in Switzerland in preparation for a career in the hotel business. In the first establishment, ‘I was the only English boy and all my classmates were Germans or Italians. I got a bit fed up with their sniping at the British Empire all the time. I spoke to the housemaster and told him what was happening and told him I intended to challenge them to a boxing bout every time it happened with him as the referee. And so I was knocked down about twelve times.’22
Pat Hancock was sixteen when, in 1935, he went to stay with a family near Hanover and attended the local school. ‘I saw enough of the German youth movement to know how strictly disciplined they were and how confident they were that they had a great role to play in the world.’ In the streets of Hanover he saw formations of troops marching everywhere. ‘They were cock of the walk…everything glistened. I thought, my goodness, these are people who are going to have a go, given an opportunity.’23
During an air tour of Europe in the spring of 1935 Jeffrey Quill had stopped at Berlin. He wrote to his mother that he had arrived at Templehof ‘in the middle of a sort of Hendon Air Display – they shot red lights at us to stop us landing but I was hanged if I was going to float round the sky waiting for their air display to finish, so I landed in the middle of it. They were a bit annoyed at first, but as I couldn’t understand what they were saying I just laughed and they soon quietened down. They are much too serious up here.’24
Tony Bartley decided to visit Germany after being told by the captain of his rugby team, an RAF officer, that war was inevitable. After leaving Stowe school he had joined a City accounting firm to learn the profession, but left after a year. What he saw in the Reich impressed him profoundly. In Frankfurt-on-Main, staying with acquaintances of his parents, he came across a middle-aged man with a shaven head in the city’s botanical gardens. He learned he was a distinguished Jew who had just been released from a concentration camp. He told him of his experiences and invited him home to meet his family. When Bartley informed his hosts, they were horrified and told him to sever the new friendship or return to Britain. When he asked for a reason, he was told that ‘their son, a Hitler Youth, would denounce his father to the Gestapo for harbouring a Jew fraternizer’.25
Ben Bowring, who joined 600 Auxiliary Squadron in 1938, met Germans in Switzerland, where he was at school, and in America, where his father travelled for business, and later through friends in Britain. He ‘absolutely loathed them. I knew them socially and they were always asking me to fly over to Germany and one thing and another. I knew perfectly well by their attitude that they were a very cruel type of people…[They] had quick tempers and they thought they were masters of everything. Since I was something of an athlete, if I beat them at a game they were quite upset and quite likely they wouldn’t talk to you for a day or so. Or else if you beat them very badly they would come cringing to you on their knees (like) bullies, having been very unpleasant to you beforehand.’26
The same unsporting tendencies were to strike Richard Hillary when he went with an Oxford boat crew to compete in Germany in July 1938 in the ‘General Goering Prize Fours’ at Bad Ems. The team’s attitude to the race appeared languid, an approach which annoyed their hosts.
Shortly before the race we walked down to the changing-rooms to get ready. All five German crews were lying flat on their backs on mattresses, great brown stupid-looking giants, taking deep breaths. It was all very impressive. I was getting out of my shirt when one of them came up and spoke to me, or rather harangued me, for I had no chance to say anything. He had been watching us, he said, and could only come to the conclusion that we were thoroughly representative of a decadent race. No German crew would dream of appearing so lackadaisical if rowing in England: they would train and they would win. Losing this race might not appear very important to us, but I could rest assured that the German people would not fail to notice and learn from our defeat.
The Oxford crew won, by two fifths of a second, and took home the cup, a gold shell-case mounted with a German eagle. ‘It was certainly an unpopular win,’ Hillary wrote afterwards. ‘Had we shown any enthusiasm or given any impression that we had trained they would have tolerated it, but as it was they showed merely a sullen resentment.’27
Hillary subsequently saw the race as a metaphor for the coming conflict, a ‘surprisingly accurate pointer to the course of the war. We were quite untrained, lacked any form of organization and were really quite hopelessly casual’. This was a particularly British piece of mythologizing that was some distance from the truth. Hillary was fiercely competitive on the river, and the pilots of Fighter Command would turn out to be just as aggressive as their Luftwaffe counterparts. As for training, they had prepared for the war as hard as anybody. The problem was that much of the effort had been misdirected.
It was a question of image. The Fighter Boys, like the rowers, wanted to win, and took their superiority for granted. They would rather, though, that victory was attained without too much obvious exertion. The picture was of amused, easy-going Britons triumphing over robotic Germans. It was the view the pilots had taken of themselves and it was the way they wished to be seen. This, very soon, would come to pass.
It was true, however, that deep political thinking, let alone ideological conviction, was rare among the pilots. All the services had a tradition in which political enthusiasms were regarded as both unprofessional and socially undesirable. The RAF was different in that the majority of its members, the tradesmen and technicians, were from the ambitious upper working class or lower middle class and more inclined to question authority than their counterparts in the army. Junior officers could also be vocal about decisions by higher authority, especially where life-or-death matters concerning equipment or tactics were concerned, and the general conduct of the war would later sometimes be criticised.
At Cranwell, the debating society provided a formal arena for political discussion. In November 1938 the motion was that, ‘This House considers that an agreement with Germany is in the best interests of Great Britain and of the world at large.’ It was only narrowly defeated by thirty-six to thirty-four votes, after an intervention by a cadet who pointed out that ‘the persecution of the Jews precluded any decent-minded people from having anything to do with the Germans’.28
Among the squadron pilots, though, domestic and international politics and the details of each crisis appear to have excited little interest. Billy Drake and the Tangmere pilots ‘bought a newspaper to look at the sporting events, that’s all. We didn’t read it to find out what Hitler was doing. The attitude in the mess was that the war was inevitable, so why talk about it?’29 Geoffrey Page’s recollection was that ‘pre-war and all through the war one never really discussed politics at all. It wasn’t an issue…Two subjects were taboo in an officers’ mess. You never talked politics and you never talked about the opposite sex.’ The first prohibition was more strictly observed than the second.30
At