‘The pilots were only the pinnacle’
On Battle of Britain Day, Joe Shute reveals the vital role of the Royal Air Force’s backroom staff in securing victory
Deep in the archives of the RAF Museum in Hendon are the remains of an identity card. It bears the photograph of a young pilot who, like many of his wartime generation, had sprouted a pencil-thin moustache in an attempt to persuade the airfield ground crews he was older than his 23 years.
The name Edgar John Wilcox is still legible, as well as his rank of flying officer and the station where he was posted: RAF Acklington. The rest has been scorched black by the inferno where he met his fate.
Wilcox was killed on Aug 31 1940, during the height of the Battle of Britain that raged between June and October of that year, as Hitler tried to destroy the RAF ahead of a planned invasion code-named Operation Sealion.
Wilcox, a former Surrey public schoolboy who had already fought with distinction during his short piloting career, had been scrambled in his Spitfire P9457 to the Kent coast to engage in a dogfight with Luftwaffe aircraft flying in from the Channel. In the ensuing chaos, he was shot down.
His body was buried near the crash site at All Saints Churchyard in Staplehurst, one of 554 British and Allied pilots who died during the Battle of Britain. His RAF wings and identity card were recovered from the wreckage and placed in the archives alongside a letter from his sister, Jess, sent just nine days before his death. “Are we proud of you,” she wrote. “We practically stand up and cheer every passing Spitfire we see.” His story is one of countless threads that make up the 100-year history of the Royal Air Force. Often they have been forgotten in the fog of war or simply never told. However, a new book compiled to mark the centenary of the RAF has pulled together this vast archive to create what it claims is the “ultimate documentary history” of the winged branch of Britain’s forces.
The book, entitled The RAF Commemorative Anthology, has been compiled by the publishing house Extraordinary Editions from a treasure trove of lost and forgotten documents in the RAF archives in Hendon and produced in conjunction with the RAF100 Appeal and RAF Museum, with regimental charities receiving a proceed from every sale.
As with the publisher’s previously hugely successful regimental history of the SAS during the Second World War, The RAF Commemorative Anthology is told entirely through original documents.
“This is raw history,” says Martin Morgan, the publisher’s managing director, who has been part of a research team trawling through the archives over the past
18 months. “This is not interpreted with the filter or prism of a historian. I just find some of these stories so hugely evocative.”
The book consists of about 700 pages of documents, orders, operational reports, maps, diaries, letters and ephemera. Only 1,500 copies are being printed worldwide and sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The book will be published next spring, although subscriptions are open now. While the book spans a full century of history, the Battle of Britain features prominently. And in reviewing so many forgotten documents relating to the Battle of Britain, the historians involved claim the book shines new light on how the RAF’S determination not to be cowed changed our society forever. Each year for Battle of Britain Day, on Sept 15, the country remembers the moment Fighter Command’s hurricanes and spitfires managed to repulse two huge German bombing raids – a defence so spirited that, two days later, Hitler indefinitely postponed his invasion.
But according to Peter Devitt, a curator at the RAF Museum who has assisted with the research of the book, the “Few” surmised by Winston Churchill when he acclaimed the heroics of the 2,937 RAF and Allied aircrew has obscured the reality.
In fact, he argues, the pilots were the “teeth” of a complex defence system relying on thousands of RAF and Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) personnel and volunteers from the Royal Observer Corps.
“The Battle of Britain is the defining moment for the RAF,” he says. “There’s this huge pyramid of which the pilots are just the pinnacle.”
After initially being recruited to fill clerical and transport posts to release men for front-line duty, the WAAF soon became a vital cog in the war effort: working as codebreakers, mechanics, engineers, and reporters and plotters in Britain’s air defence network known as the Dowding System. During the Battle of Britain, their work was of vital importance and shattered the outdated perceptions of women’s role in society. Devitt cites three stories that have been taken from the RAF archive as part of research into the book.
On Sunday Aug 18 1940, Elizabeth Mortimer was manning a switchboard in the armoury at Biggin Hill airfield when Luftwaffe bombers instigated a heavy raid. Bombs rained down on the airfield, destroying several motor transport sheds and smashing a nearby anti-aircraft gun to pieces, killing those manning it. But Mortimer, 28, remained at her post throughout the chaos, calmly relaying messages to the defence positions.
As a result of her heroism, she became the first WAAF to be awarded the military medal. Two other women posted at Biggin Hill during the Battle of Britain also received the honour: Elspeth Henderson, who on Aug 30 helped dig out the wounded and dying from the rubble of an air raid shelter at the airfield after an attack by nine Juncker 88 bombers; and Helen Turner, who similarly remained at her post in the nearby emergency telephone exchange.
On Nov 2 1940, at the end of the Battle of Britain, all three were recognised for their “courage and example of a high order”.
During the Battle of Britain, women delivered non-operational aircraft, but in 1941 they were also cleared to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes. Still, progress has been painfully slow. Only last month the RAF became the first branch of the British military to open up every role to men and women. “The societal impacts of the Battle of Britain are temporary in some cases,” says Devitt. “But in other areas, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
Another area highlighted by Devitt is the acceptance of foreign pilots into cockpits, which were traditionally the preserve of white former public schoolboys. This was something necessitated by the sheer bloodiness of the Battle of Britain.
One fifth of Fighter Command’s aircrew came from overseas and 16 nations were represented in its squadrons. They included men such as Karel Mrazek, a Czech pilot who flew with distinction in the RAF between 1940 and 1945, and whose photographs taken during the Battle of Britain – held in the RAF archive – provide a fascinating portrait of a pilot’s life during the war.
According to Devitt, in Nov 1940 the first black and Asian pilots joined the RAF ranks. The Army and Navy tried to reimpose a “colour bar”, but the RAF fought strongly to include those of all ethnicities. “They needed extra people, and were recruiting them from wherever they could find,” he says.
In the fight to protect British values, the RAF came to represent the best of them. And through its history, we discover our own.