Spitfire Pilot

By David Crook and Richard Overy

“A brilliant first-hand account of the life of a fighter pilot” in World War II (The Spectator).
 
Spitfire Pilot was written in 1940 in the heat of battle, when the RAF stood alone against the might of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is a tremendous personal account of one of the fiercest and most idealized air conflicts—the Battle of Britain—seen through the eyes of a pilot of the famous 609 Squadron, which shot down over one hundred planes in that epic contest.
 
Often hopelessly outnumbered, David Crook and his colleagues, in their state-of-the-art Spitfires, committed acts of unimaginable bravery against the Messerschmitts and the Junkers. Many did not make it—and Crook describes the absence they leave in the squadron with great poignancy.
 
Includes an introduction by historian Richard Overy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781909808799

David Crook

David Moore Crook, DFC, was a British fighter pilot and flying ace of the Second World War. On 18 December 1944 he was flying a Spitfire on a high level photographic sortie and was seen to dive into the sea near Aberdeen. He was officially listed as missing in action.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Battle of Britain has for long been the centre-point of British historical memory of the Second World War. Historians will argue about its real significance or the relative merits of the Air Force or the Navy as a deterrent, but the one thing that was avoided successfully in 1940 was German invasion. Like the fate of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – another date that used to stick in every schoolchild’s memory – the failure of the German Air Force did not make Britain’s enemy a great deal weaker, but it did prevent violation of the homeland.

The Battle of Britain was one of the few military campaigns that Britain was prepared for in 1940. Throughout the pre-war years money was spent on creating a defensive shield of modern fighter aircraft, radar stations, ground observers and civil defence measures as a top priority. Perhaps Hitler and the German military leadership judged Britain by the small size and modest performance of the Army and Air Force in the Battle of France; what the enemy failed to grasp was the nature of the complex air defence scheme that was designed to prevent not invasion, but the relentless and ruthless bombing of the British mainland.

It is this scheme that lies at the heart of Spitfire Pilot. This account of the Battle of Britain could only have appeared with the blessing of the Air Ministry. Its story reflects quite closely the brief history of the Battle published by the Ministry in March 1941. The various phases of the Battle are clear to see – the early probing attacks by the Luftwaffe during which British pilots learned some hard tactical lessons; the more serious assault in August when ports, military installations and airfields were systematically attacked; the city bombing attacks of September when the German Air Force began at last to take heavy losses; and finally the tail-end of the Battle when the German Air Force tried to lure up British fighters to join in small fighter-to-fighter engagements and instead found themselves experiencing unacceptable rates of attrition. Though these stages were only dimly evident to the pilots who fought a continuous battle from June to October, each marked a definite change in the operational or tactical experience of both sides.

British pilots survived the later phases better as they gained confidence and experience; in the first German attacks in June and July, small in scale compared with the main battle a month later, Crook’s squadron took high casualties. By the end of the Battle losses were the exception rather than the rule. Slowly the Few, made famous in Churchill’s Commons speech on 20th August 1940, became the Many. Fighter Command ended the battle with more aircraft and pilots than it had begun with thanks to a well-organised training programme and frantic efforts to squeeze Spitfires and Hurricanes out of the aircraft industry. On the other side fighter pilots became a scarcer commodity. The diary entries reveal not just the growing expertise of British air crew but the relative decline of German pilot performance from the high standards of the cohort that began the battle.

The bare facts and figures, however, say little about what it was like, day in, day out, to fly into combat against an unpredictable and courageous enemy. The diary reveals that for many young men in the late 1930s and early 1940s flying was what they desperately wanted to do. There is not much here about the nature of the war for democracy or the German enemy (throughout referred to as Huns, as they had been during the First World War). Only the Polish pilots who joined the squadron seem to have really hated the Germans because of the destruction of their country in September 1939.

For the young men who fought, the battle was expressed in the language of the school playing field. The sporting metaphors were uniquely English. Who else could write that waiting to shoot down the squadron’s one hundredth aircraft was like a batsman poised expectantly at the crease on 99, waiting for the elusive but well-earned century? Whatever efforts might be made now to show that the Battle of Britain is part myth, part truth, the diary of this particular pilot shows beyond doubt that the traditional image of the youthful, fearless and intrepid pilot is really how it

Reviews for Spitfire Pilot

[jamespurcell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Diary of a young pilot in the RAF, trained in 1939, flew in the Battle of Britain. Married with 3 children and died in a 1944 training accident.Three months after advanced flight school, 5 had earned DFCs, eight were dead out of a class of 15.