Spitfire Down: Fighter Boys Who Failed to Return

By Dilip Sarkar and John Peters

Profoundly moved by the stories of wartime casualties as a child, Dilip Sarkar has since spent a lifetime reconstructing the lives of many of the fallen and is passionate about recording and sharing this very personal hidden history. In Spitfire Down he explores the stories of thirteen pilots who failed to return, all killed, either in action or flying accidents, while a fourteenth, Flying Officer Buck Casson, was brought down by a German ace over France and captured. There is, for example, the virtually unknown story of ‘The Baby of the RAF’, Sergeant Geoffrey Painting. Posted to fly Spitfires with 118 Squadron at RAF Ibsley in Hampshire, Painting was hit by flak during an attack on enemy shipping off Cherbourg on 30 September 1941. Still listed as missing, at just 17, he is believed to have been the youngest RAF pilot killed during the Second World War. The author has reconstructed Painting’s short life with help from his family, and forensically deconstructed that last flight with the help of the now late Wing Commander Peter Howard-Williams DFC, who was flying with the teenage pilot that day. The author also explores the heart-rending story of an American trainee fighter pilot, Pilot Officer ‘Jim Bob’ Lee, whose Spitfire collided with a Wellington bomber over Gloucestershire – resulting in the loss of all airmen involved. Two Canadian pilots perished on Pen-y-Fan, the highest peak in South Wales. The multi-national effort that defeated Hitler is further emphasised, in fact, through the stories of both Wing Commander Piotr Laguna and Flying Officer Franek Surma. But perhaps most tragic of all is how lightning struck Joan Welch twice: her first fiancée, Flight Lieutenant Lester Sanders DFC, was killed test-flying Spitfires in 1942, and her second, Pilot Officer Ian Smith, was killed flying in Palestine in 1945. Using correspondence, diaries and other personal papers of the pilots concerned, the author has reconstructed their all-too brief lives and provided a lasting and profusely illustrated record of these sacrifices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399089487

Dilip Sarkar

A prolific author, DILIP SARKAR has been obsessed with the Second World War for a lifetime. An MBE for ‘services to aviation history’, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, unsurprisingly, for a retired police detective with a First in Modern History, his work has always been evidence-based - often challenging long-accepted myths. Firmly focussed on the ‘human’ experience of war, his many previous works include the authorized biographies of Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader and Air Vice-Marshal ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, the best-selling Spitfire Manual and The Few. Dilip has presented at such prestigious venues as Oxford University, the Imperial War and RAF Museums, and National Memorial Arboretum; he works on TV documentaries, both on and off screen.

Book preview

Introduction

The Supermarine Spitfire emerged from the Second World War as the very physical embodiment of Britain’s defiance of Hitler and the country’s essential contribution to Total Victory against Germany. Moreover, and perhaps even more than ever, all these years later the Spitfire has really become the icon associated with British national pride, courage and excellence. The sight and sound of R.J. Mitchell’s little fighter continues to inspire and excite, and as airframes are increasingly discovered and rebuilt, more and more Spitfires are returning to the skies. The Spitfire, therefore, remains the wartime darling, the star of every air show, and interest in its story, if anything, increases daily – or so it seems.

The genius Reginald Joseph Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire.

When all is said and done, however, the Spitfire is a machine, and until in human hands an inanimate object. A human being, of course, designed the aircraft, others built and maintained it, while the stars of the show – the fighter pilots – flew in her to battle. Tragically, the Spitfire’s designer, R.J. Mitchell, died of cancer in 1937, aged just 42, without ever knowing the contribution he had made, or being aware of just how much the Spitfire excited the public consciousness. Nonetheless, Mitchell designed the Spitfire for one purpose: to defend Britain, and he was acutely aware that this was a warplane, built for killing, and in which pilots could – and would – be killed. In a foreword to one of my earlier books, R.J. Mitchell’s son, the now sadly late Dr Gordon Mitchell, summed up his father’s feelings succinctly:

My father was heard to say on a number of occasions that ‘A Spitfire without a pilot is just a lump of metal’, which was meant to show the high regard and respect he had for the pilots whose job it was to fly his ‘lump of metal’. I think that this book mirrors those sentiments, in that the first part is devoted to describing the Spitfire in accurate detail, this being followed by in-depth descriptions of eleven individuals who had the task of flying the ‘lump of metal’ into battle.

The same, in fact, could be said of this particular book, because it develops the same theme, giving currency to the memories of various young pilots who flew Spitfires but failed to return, for one reason or another – some killed, others missing, and one a prisoner of war who survived; some were lost on operations, although a surprising number were killed on training or routine flights. Indeed, here we explore stories of the lesser-knowns, and not so obvious. The astute reader will note that although certain of the pilots included flew during the Battle of Britain, none failed to return during that epic summer of 1940. The reason for that is such stories are told in my previously published Battle of Britain 1940: The Finest Hour’s Human Cost, and so in this volume my focus has been beyond the Battle of Britain.

In this book, we reconstruct the all too brief lives of the young men involved, often privy to their personal letters and diaries, through which we get a glimpse of their innermost thoughts, emotions, and of how it was for people back then. Were R.J. Mitchell able to comment, I am sure he would approve of this endeavour to emphasis this human experience – and sacrifice – connected with his wonderful Spitfire. These young men came from various backgrounds and walks of life, professional airmen and amateurs, NCOs and officers, and represent what was a multi-national effort to defeat Hitler. No one has been included because of any preconceived commercial plan, all have simply crossed my path, research-wise, at some stage over the years, and are brought together here. Sadly, owing to the sheer volume and march of time, countless stories, such as those you are about to read, will be lost to history, but these at least have been recorded and represent those who gave their all – flying Spitfires.

Dilip Sarkar MBE FRHistS, 2021

Flying Officer Peter ‘Sneezy’ Brown of 41 Squadron up from Catterick in a Spitfire Mk IIA, P8044, in early 1941.

R.J. Mitchell’s young son, Gordon, with the proto-type Spitfire, K5054, at Eastleigh in 1936. Gordon recalled his father’s deep concern that young men were likely to die flying his Spitfire, and that without pilots, for whom he had only the greatest respect, the Spitfire was an inanimate object.

Dr Gordon Mitchell with the author at the former Malvern Spitfire Team’s Spitfire! exhibition on 8 August 1988; sadly Gordon, who was a Patron of the ‘MST’, left us in 2009.

Prologue

Spitfire! The very word is evocative, the perfect description of a fighter aircraft. The shape and sound of the Spitfire is equally perfect, particularly those marques powered by the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Look at a Spitfire today and its sleek elliptical shape would not be out of place on a modern designer’s computer screen – nearly ninety years after it was envisioned at a comparatively simple drawing board. That Supermarine designer Reginald Joseph Mitchell’s Spitfire should still excite, and the deeds of those who went to war in her continue to inspire, can only be a special tribute to everyone connected with this wonderful aircraft. So what is it about the Spitfire that made it so great? What is it about a vintage aircraft that continues to fascinate us nearly a century on? What is it about the Merlin’s roar that brings a tear to the eye, a lump in the throat? Why do we so revere, even now, those who flew to battle in her, all those years ago? Why should we remember them? To understand this, we need to travel back in time, to a desperately dark period in world history.

When the Second World War broke out, aviation remained a comparatively new phenomenon. The ‘Wright Flyer’, made and flown by the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, had become the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to sustain controlled flight with a pilot aboard at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903; just eleven years later, the First World War erupted and the aeroplane went to war. Those early warplanes were biplanes, with open cockpits, fixed undercarriages, and two-bladed, fixed-pitch, propellers, which is to say that the angle of ‘bite’, similar to changing gear in a car, cannot be changed. At first, these primitive machines were used for scouting and reconnaissance work, but inevitably air-to-air combat ensued and so the race to stay one step ahead of the enemy began. Hand-held revolvers and rifles gave way to machine-guns, and aircrew were soon dropping bombs – at first by hand. In fact, on Christmas Eve 1914 the Germans jettisoned the first of many bombs over England; it exploded harmlessly in a Dover garden – but was a terrifying indication of things to come. Indeed, from that point on Britain could no longer rely upon being an island for protection, or exclusively upon the Royal Navy for home security. Warfare had irrevocably changed, and air power had been born.

Throughout most of the First World War, British military aviation was delivered jointly by the army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, but as the importance of military aviation increased, it was decided to create a new service: the Royal Air Force, which was born on 1 April 1918. Major General ‘Boom’ Trenchard became the first Chief of the Air Staff and set about building the new junior service. In the wake of the Allies defeating the Central Powers and the guns falling silent on 11 November 1918, the resulting Versailles Peace Conference the following year sought, among other things, to so restrict the German military that the jingoistic nation would never threaten peace again. One of Versailles’ primary clauses was preventing Germany from having an air force, and so, with the threat apparently neutralised permanently, the Western Allies focused upon disarmament. Moreover, the air power doctrine of the time revolved heavily around the concept that the ‘bomber would always get through’, as British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the House in 1932. Trenchard subscribed to this view, stating that, ‘It is on the destruction of enemy industries and above all in the lowering of morale of enemy nationals caused by bombing that the ultimate victory lies.’ Indeed, Trenchard considered fighters ‘only necessary to keep up the morale of one’s own people’. Consequently, what little spending there was on defence revolved around the bomber force, and in 1932, Britain abandoned what had been a miniscule RAF expansion programme. The following year, however, Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazis, became Chancellor of Germany – and, again, everything changed.

The Führer immediately set about contravening and reversing what Germany saw as injustices arising from the Treaty of Versailles, namely the severe restrictions on the military and territorial concessions. Already, though, Weimar Germany had begun secretly rebuilding its prohibited Luftwaffe, far away from prying Western eyes, deep in Soviet Russia. The Great Depression caused by the Wall Street stock-market crash of 1929, had not helped, the resulting financial chaos affecting the next decade. The British government, therefore, had serious socio-economic issues to address at home, which it tried its best to do – while Germany fervently rearmed. Later, Churchill would write that for defence spending, the years 1931–35 were those of the ‘locust’. Be that as it may, the complete lack of substantial rearmament and deficiencies on doctrinal thinking were caused by three things: fiscal constraints; political indifference or opposition, and Trenchard’s unshakeable belief in the bomber. By 1935, however, the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany was increasingly plain – and could no longer be ignored. At last Britain tentatively began to rearm. On 25 February 1936, Expansion Scheme ‘F’ was approved: 124 squadrons (1,736 aircraft of all types) by April 1937. Unfortunately, while Scheme ‘F’ increased the bomber force to 1,000 aircraft, the number of fighters was only maintained. Ironically, however, there were concurrently exciting developments in fighter design.

During the 1920s, both financial constraints and, of course, disarmament had severely curtailed resources available to the RAF for research and development, restrictions applying equally to the British aircraft industry generally. Paradoxically, in spite of this, it was actually an exciting time for aviation – thanks to the Schneider Trophy competition. The Frenchman Jacques Schneider, son of an armament manufacturer, was perplexed by the demonstrable fact that although seven-tenths of the world’s surface was covered by water, marine lagged far behind land-based aviation. Schneider saw the sea providing cheap airports with huge potential for aviation – and so inaugurated an international air race for seaplanes over a water course measured by fixed points. Whichever nation won the coveted silver trophy three consecutive times got to keep it. This was also a period of globally emerging nationalism, meaning that the exciting aerial race became a matter of great national pride. It was this, more than anything else, that drove forward development – leading directly to the fast monoplane fighters of the Second World War.

In 1929, the same year that Wall Street crashed, Supermarine’s gifted designer R.J. Mitchell won the trophy for a second consecutive time, with his sleek S.6. Unfortunately, the economic collapse meant no government funding was forthcoming for Supermarine’s next all-important entry. This incensed a wealthy patriot, Lady Houston, who personally funded the £100,000 necessary for Mitchell to compete. Her ladyship’s confidence was well-placed: on 12 September 1931, Flight Lieutenant J.N. Boothman flashed over the delighted crowds at 340.08 mph with the throttle not even wide open – winning the Schneider Trophy for Britain, once and for all. That afternoon, Flight Lieutenant G.H. Stainforth took up another S.6B and set a new world air speed record at 379.05 mph. British aviation was supreme, delighting the depressed nation and arousing the interest of the Air Member for Supply & Research: Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Dowding – whose name would become synonymous with the unprecedented aerial battle for Britain’s survival which lay ahead.

At the time, owing to the development and investment emphasis, bombers were getting faster – able to outpace existing fighter types. When Mitchell won the Schneider Trophy, the air defence of Great Britain relied entirely upon biplanes such as the Bristol Bulldog, which was 10 mph slower than Hawker Hart light bomber introduced in 1929. Although advised by experts that biplanes were superior to monoplanes, Dowding, who had himself flown biplanes during the First World War, disagreed and rightly perceived the monoplane as a major improvement. He also recognised that Mitchell’s more advanced designs used more metal parts than the wood-framed and fabric-covered biplanes – which Dowding saw as a potential advantage in the event of Britain ever being blockaded and timber being in short supply. Dowding believed that the experience of British aircraft designers gained during the Schneider Trophy races could and should be applied to new military, land-based, aircraft. Consequently, starting on 1 October 1931, the Air Ministry issued various specifications for a new fighter, inviting British designers to submit proposals. Eventually, in April 1935, the Air Ministry issued its ‘Requirements for Single-Engine Single-Seater Day & Night Fighter (F.10/35).’ This new aircraft, among other things, had to feature eight machine-guns, an enclosed cockpit, be capable of at least 310 mph at 15,000ft, and be at least 40 mph faster that contemporary bombers at that height. Interestingly, though, there was no requirement for the new ‘real killer fighter’ to be a monoplane, indicating not all at Whitehall were as convinced as Dowding that the biplane was obsolete.

On 6 November 1935, Hawker’s Chief Test Pilot, P.W.S. ‘George’ Bulman, flew Sydney Camm’s Hurricane on its maiden flight from Brooklands. The flight was successful, and on 3 June 1936, the Air Ministry ordered 600 of the new type – the largest such order to date and indicative of the growing concern regarding German rearmament by this time. That concern was fully justified. The same year, Hitler revealed his new Luftwaffe to a disbelieving world in contemptuous disregard of Versailles and the Western Allies. In May 1935, Professor Willy Messerschmitt’s new monoplane fighter – the ‘109’ – had flown for the first time. Messerschmitt had followed a simple principle: the smallest and lightest airframe built around the most powerful engine. It would prove a formidable adversary.

On 5 March 1936, a small group of men gathered at Eastleigh airfield, near the Supermarine works, located on the banks of the Itchen Estuary at Woolston, near Southampton. The occasion was an event which could perhaps be considered one of the most important flights since the Wright brothers flew at Kittyhawk: the first test flight of the prototype Spitfire, K5054. Vickers’ Chief Test Pilot, ‘Mutt’ Summers, made a short but successful flight, after which he told excited onlookers that he did not want any of the aircraft’s controls altered in any way. Spitfire legend interprets this as meaning that the aircraft was perfect from the off, but such a statement is quite ridiculous even for an aircraft as outstanding as Mitchell’s Spitfire. What Summers really meant, of course, was that he did not want any of the controls interfered with before his next flight. Nevertheless, from that very first flight the Spitfire legend was born. It was a profound moment, when this iconic fighter flew for the first time. Soon, the shape and sound of Mitchell’s Spitfire would become a potent symbol of British national pride – and to fly one, the pinnacle of ambition and achievement for a generation of young men.

On 3 June 1936, the Air Ministry also ordered 310 Spitfires from Supermarine, at a cost of £4,500 each. According to popular myth, delivery of those machines was delayed by the Spitfire’s advanced design, but more accurately this was because Supermarine, a comparatively small company, lacked the facilities and resources for mass production. Camm’s Hurricane, the first of the new British fighters to fly, was also first to reach the RAF when 111 Squadron at Northolt took delivery of the first production machine in November 1937. By then, while RAF pilots made the quantum leap from biplane to modern monoplane and learned how to fly their very different and more advanced machines, the Me 109 was already available in numbers and being blooded in aerial combat over Spain – as Hitler’s Condor Legion supported the fascist General Franco in a bitter civil war. The Spitfire – already supreme in the public’s imagination owing to its victorious Schneider Trophy lineage – would not be received by the RAF until 4 August 1938, when 19 Squadron received the first Spitfire at Duxford. As we have seen, powered flight itself was only thirty-four years old on that date, military aviation younger still – and whereas the Germans had operated their Me 109 monoplane for three years, and even been to war in Spain, RAF fighter pilots now had to convert from their Gloster Gauntlet biplanes, which were little different to First World War types, to the very different, modern, Spitfire and Hurricane. The new monoplanes had arrived just in the nick of time; had the RAF gone to war in biplanes, the result would undoubtedly have been a catastrophic defeat.

Sadly, by the time the Spitfire entered service, R.J. Mitchell had finally succumbed to cancer, aged 42, on 11 June 1937. The Spitfire’s creator died without ever knowing of the immeasurable contribution his little fighter made to preserving democracy.

When Trenchard originally created the RAF, his vision was that all officers would be pilots, permanently commissioned and trained at the RAF College Cranwell. Cranwell, however, was too small to produce the quantity of pilots required by the RAF, especially in time of war, and, of course, in reality not all officers were capable of being pilots, which is a skill above and beyond normal duties. In 1921, Trenchard, to both achieve the number of pilots he needed and create a trained reserve, permitted a small number of non-commissioned officers (NCO) to re-train as pilots. The concept was that these men would fly for five years before resuming their original trades, while eligible for recall to flying duties in the event of an emergency. The initiative was both popular and economic, but numbers remained small: in 1925, 13.9 per cent of pilots were NCOs, rising to 17.1 per cent in 1935. Trenchard’s next initiative was revolutionary: Short Service Commissions (SSC). In the senior services, officers usually served for the duration of their working lives (hence the term ‘Permanent Commission’). This, however, led to a ‘dead man’s shoes’ scenario, which Trenchard wished to avoid given that flying is obviously a young man’s activity. The SSC scheme provided for officers to serve a fixed contract of four years’ active service, followed by six on the reserve list. Such officers were only eligible for promotion so far as flight lieutenant but could transfer to a Permanent Commission upon successfully passing the required examination. The pre-war SSC initiative also reached out to young (albeit exclusively white) men of the Empire and Commonwealth, who travelled to England and became both RAF officers and pilots. Together with Direct Entrants from the University Air Squadrons (UAS), SSC officers were not trained at Cranwell, which remained exclusively for professional career officers, but at Service Flying Training Schools (SFTS). Furthermore, the Direct Entry Scheme (DES) provided a small number of permanent commissions offered to university graduates via competition for limited places.

Another sound initiative was the creation of the Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) in 1924, based upon the territorial concept; by 1930 such squadrons comprised 5 per cent of the air force’s strength. The most significant and forward-thinking feature of 1936’s Expansion Scheme ‘F’ was the recognition that a trained reserve was essential, leading to creation of the RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR), intended to:

have wide appeal based upon the Citizen Volunteer principle with a common mode of entry and promotion and commissioning on merit … So far as aircrew training was concerned, the system was based upon local town centres for spare time ground training and upon aerodrome centres associated with the town centres for flying training at the weekend, also for a fortnight’s annual camp.

All such volunteer aircrew were automatically made sergeants – much to the chagrin of professional NCOs, who had taken years to attain that exulted rank.

When Britain had belatedly begun re-arming in 1935, air defence was coordinated by the Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB). In 1936, it was sensibly decided to separate this unwieldy command into two: Fighter and Bomber Commands. Thus, Fighter Command was created on 6 July 1936, with its headquarters at Bentley Priory, to the north of London. On 14 July 1936, Dowding was appointed the first Commander-in-Chief. This reorganisation provided an unprecedented opportunity to overhaul and revise the nation’s air defences – giving Dowding freedom to harness sophisticated science and techniques into the mix. For this task, as previously Air Member for Research & Development, involved in the commissioning of both new monoplane fighters and Radio Direction Finding (RDF, better known as ‘radar’), there could have been no better choice. Unlike many of his peers, Dowding had always been a champion of air defence – arguing against Trenchard’s obsession with offence, steadfastly maintaining his unshakeable belief that ‘security of the base must come first’:

The best defence of the country is fear of the fighter. If we are strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be brought to a standstill …. If we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be brought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed.

Here, at last, was a man with the experience and vision necessary to prepare Britain to resist determined air attack.

At 0100 hrs on Friday 1 September 1939, general mobilisation of British forces was ordered, including reservists, territorials and auxiliaries. From 1936 onwards the RAF’s identity had started changing, with the advent of the SSC, RAFVR and other initiatives, from a comparatively small and elite peacetime air force to now being on a war footing. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany, following Hitler’s invasion of, and refusal to withdraw from, Poland. Because of the Second World War, and with it the RAF’s need for pilots, countless young men of varying backgrounds were able to fly, something that would never otherwise have happened in most cases. Many would achieve their ambition and fulfil their dream to fly the iconic Spitfire, perceived and propagandised as the ultimate fighter.

It was not just would-be pilots to whom the Spitfire appealed, however; Bob Morris:

I joined the RAF before the war started and was more interested in the technical rather than the flying side. I studied aeronautical engineering at the RAF Technical School, Halton. In May 1940 I passed out as an Airman 1st Class, looked at the list pinned on the board and discovered that I had been posted to 66 Squadron at Coltishall in 12 Group. I knew not where Coltishall was, or what aircraft 66 Squadron had.

As it happened, Coltishall was in Norfolk, and my first glimpse of 66 Squadron was from the bus which travelled along the airfield for a short distance; what an absolute thrill to see Spitfires. Here was a young man’s dream!

Pilot Officer Hubert ‘Dizzy’ Allen was a pilot with ‘Clickety-Click’, and had joined 66 Squadron at Duxford the month before Bob Morris arrived:

I didn’t know where Duxford was and nor was I aware of what aircraft 66 Squadron had – they could have had Hurricanes, which did not appeal to me in any way. On the other hand they might be Spitfires, which appealed to me very much. I had seen the Spitfire in flight, had seen many photographs of it, to me it was the very pink of perfection (and after due experience proved to me that it was indeed perfection). When I arrived at Duxford’s hangars I could see nothing but Spitfires littering the airfield – not a Hurricane in sight. Wherever Heaven is, St Peter opened the doors when I arrived at Duxford!

In May 1940, Pilot Officer David Crook, an Auxiliary Air Force pilot, completed his Service Flying Training and joined 609 ‘West Riding’ Squadron at Turnhouse in Scotland. An indication of the uncertainty of the times is provided by this simple statistic: of the fifteen pilots who trained together with Crook, just a few months later five had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, but eight, alas, were dead. In his superb first-hand account Spitfire Pilot, published in 1942, Crook wrote:

The next day I did my first trip in a Spitfire. I had waited for this moment for nearly two years, and when it came it was just as exciting as I always expected.

Having mastered the cockpit drill, I got in and taxied out on the aerodrome, sat there for one moment to check that everything was OK, and then opened up with a great smooth roar, the Spitfire leapt forward like a bullet and tore madly across the aerodrome, and before I had realised quite what had happened I was in the air. I felt though the machine was completely out of control and running away with me. However, I collected my scattered wits, raised the undercarriage, and put the airscrew into coarse pitch,