Not up for the fight!
It's hard to believe but by the winter of
1938, the bulk of the Royal Air Force’s fighter squadrons flew biplanes: primarily Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Furys. Both obsolete by the start of the Second World War, these would be easy pickings for the German Luftwaffe’s newly operational and formidable 380 mph Bf 109s that were armed with multiple 20mm cannons and machine guns. Gladiators were well liked by pilots but had a high accident rate due to the aircraft’s unpredictable stall tendencies. The older Hawker Furys were faster than the Gladiators at 225 mph, but still woefully inadequate for the upcoming fight—especially with their 303 Browning machine guns. Thankfully by mid 1938, the RAF had begun to receive its first deliveries of Hurricanes and Spitfires, and a mandate was soon placed to quickly re-equip half of the Gladiator and Fury squadrons with these new monoplanes. Although by late 1940 all Gladiators and Furys had been withdrawn from front-line duties defending the British Isles, many had been sent to help defend overseas territories of the empire or given to allies like the Norwegians, Yugoslavians, Maltese, and Greeks.
“I Got One!”
25,000 feet, 1300 hours, Vassincourt, France—April 20, 1940
“Some of us were lucky enough to have been brought up to use shotguns against birds and therefore learned the rudiments of deflection shooting. That was 40 percent of the method employed in shooting down airplanes. The rest is, you just got up as slowly and as silently as you could, closed your eyes and—bang! You hoped to knock them down.”
Humorous as it may sound, according to Drake, most of the RAF’s young fighter pilots knew little more than the above in the spring of 1940. Barely a year earlier, Drake and the rest of No. 1 Squadron had transitioned from their outdated Hawker Furys to Hawker’s newest fighter, the Hurricane Mk. 1. The squadron had been flying their Hurricanes for just five months when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. With the formal declaration, No. 1 was ordered to France. The period from fall 1939 through spring 1940 was known as the “Phony War,” and like most of the British units deployed to the continent, No. 1 saw little action.
It wasn’t until mid-April that the squadron’s eager pilots had the opportunity to try their hands at shooting down the enemy. Even then, it was a “dodgy prospect” at best, says Drake. Nevertheless, their education was under way. Drake and his contemporaries, all in their early 20s, were the default leaders of the RAF, learning the fundamental principles of aerial combat they later taught to a swell of new pilots who triumphed in the Battle of Britain. The future ace had his first crack at the Luftwaffe on April 20, 1940, and he made the most of it.
“Two of our Hurricane squadrons went over to France with the Advanced Air Striking Force. I was still with No. 1 on Hurricanes. During the first year, nothing much really happened, but there were one or two incidents where we met the Germans for the first time. It was all hit or miss, however, in that we hadn’t any early warning systems. Invariably, we sat outside, smoking, at some form of readiness, and we looked up and saw condensation trails. That was our only indication of anyone being around. Then we dashed to our airplanes and went up to find out what they were, ours or theirs. As a result, we had one or two engagements. I was involved in one of them.
“We spotted one of these condensation trails early one afternoon in April. We took off, climbed up and intercepted this trail and found it was one of our photographic reconnaissance airplanes going into Germany at about 28,000 feet—a bit disappointing, really. We waved to him and decided to go home. Just at that moment, though, I looked down and suddenly saw two Bf 109s below me at 25,000 feet. There they were! I dived down and chased one of them.
“He went lower and lower, until we were right down on the deck, tearing across France. I wasn’t really gaining on him, and we were just about to cross the German border. I didn’t see it until it was too late,
but he was leading me right under some high-tension cables. Luckily, I missed them. He pulled up and looked over his shoulder to see what sort of mess I had ended up in. I was just fine, and when he pulled up, he slowed down, and I was at last able to catch up. Well, there he was in front of me, and I had a good deflection shot on him. My burst must have done some damage because he crash-landed. It was a confirmed victory. It took such a long time to catch up to him. I was elated. I went back and said, ‘I got one!’ Between our two Hurricane squadrons, we had about 10 encounters over a period of 10 months.”
Mixed up!
10,000 feet, 1100 hours, eastern France—May 13, 1940 Peeling off for home in a malfunctioning Hurricane on a late spring morning, Billy Drake had little inkling of how successful he would become. With one victory under his belt, Drake could claim to be as seasoned as any RAF fighter pilot when he took off for a patrol on May 13th. But the Battle of France, just three days old, soon spelled the end of the British Expeditionary Force. The Luftwaffe was at last out in strength, and the few British fighters on the continent were outnumbered and outgunned. Chaos reigned, and Billy Drake was about to have a taste of it.
“The actual Battle of France started on May 10, 1940, when the Luftwaffe was all over the place. But once again, you had to use your own eyesight to find them. It was a hit-or-miss situation. Still, there were so many German airplanes about and so few of us that you were bound to get mixed up. We had moved from our base at Vassincourt near Rennes, where we had spent most of the previous year, closer to the front. We landed at our new base and sorted ourselves out. I went to my billet and had a night’s sleep and got up the next morning, met the other pilots and was told to take off with my flight commander. My particular airplane was unserviceable, so I got into another one that I didn’t know very well. When we got up to about 16,000 feet, I realized I didn’t have any oxygen. That was a bloody good start. I called my leader and said, ‘Look, I’ve got no oxygen. I’m going home. Do you agree?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I peeled off.
“On the way back to base, I came across three Dornier Do-17s at about 10,000 feet. Everything was in my favor. Here they were, just flying along straight and level. They obviously never saw me, and I pulled up behind one and shot it down. Just as I
was about to shoot another one down, I, in turn, was shot at by a Bf 110. One minute, I was zeroing in on the second Dornier, and the next, my airplane was being shot full of holes. I never saw him. He was a bloody good shot, though, because suddenly, I was in flames and out of control. I was also wounded. I had bullets and shrapnel in my legs and back. I wasn’t feeling particularly pleased with life. I was hurting like hell.
“I decided that I would use my parachute, but I panicked. The airplane was in flames and I just wasn’t thinking. I undid everything and tried to bail out, but I had forgotten to open the canopy. That probably saved my life. All the flames would have come straight into the cockpit had I opened it, and I was covered in petrol. It was all over my flying suit. I regained my wits quickly, sorted everything out and got ready to bail out properly. I inverted the airplane so that the flames wouldn’t come into the cockpit and leaped out.
“The reason I know it was a 110 that shot me down is because soon after I had bailed out, he came around and strafed me on the end of the chute! He made just one pass and then must have run out of ammunition because he kept flying straight on. It was very unusual, but not really frightening. It was all over so quickly that you didn’t realize what was happening. When I
reached the ground, I was very concerned. I thought my right leg had been shattered. I came down in a field, and I revisited it in
May 2003; there is still a bloody great hole where my airplane went in. I went back with my son, and they had dug the area up to find out what was left of it. Not much really. “So there I was on the ground, and pretty soon I heard voices. It was the local farmers. They thought I was German. I was very blond in those days and I was wearing a white flying suit. They had pitchforks and scythes. I thought, ‘Christ!’, and was trying to explain in French to them that I was a rather nice Englishman. I pulled my flying suit open and showed them my wings on my tunic. As soon as they saw them, they couldn’t have been nicer. They took me to a local medical clearing station where I was told there weren’t any doctors. They had all buggered off elsewhere, and they had run out of anesthetic anyway. The French staff that remained did try to find out what was wrong with me, though. With a few shots of morphine, they played around with me and cleared all the shrapnel out of my back. I saw that I had some bits of shrapnel in my leg, but it wasn’t broken. Then they took me to a local hospital. I stayed there for 24 hours and was eventually put on a train back to Paris. I went straight to the
American hospital that I knew very well. I knew some of the doctors, too, and they cleaned me up. I wasn’t injured as badly as I had thought.
“I rejoined my unit at Le Mans. My girlfriend at the time gave me a car full of petrol, and I drove down. That was a harrowing journey, driving in a car through masses of refugees all going south, away from Paris. There were also huge amounts of French soldiers without any guns fleeing as well. That wasn’t very pleasant. When I got to Le Mans, I learned that France was on its way out.”
After fighting on the continent, he went first to No. 213 Squadron at Exeter, UK, where he volunteered to fly low-level armed reconnaissance of the occupied Channel coast during the Battle of Britain. Next, he was posted to RAF Sutton
Bridge, where his experience was sorely needed to train pilots in the operational use of the Hurricane. From 1941 to 1942, he commanded a string of Kittyhawk equipped squadrons in North Africa and scored 12 kills—in spite of the air-to-ground role the RAF P-40s were primarily tasked with. Promoted to wing commander, he took over the Krendi Wing on Malta in 1943 and scored yet another victory flying a Spitfire Mk. VC. His final frontline flying post of the War was as leader of the No. 20 Wing that operated Hawker Typhoons in mid1944.
Postwar, Drake remained in the RAF and attended RAF Staff College and served in a number of posts in the Far East and as Swiss Air Attaché. He rose to the rank of group captain and retired from the service in 1963 as the commander RAF Chivenor. 4
THE AIRPLANE WAS IN FLAMES AND I JUST WASN’T THINKING. I UNDID EVERYTHING AND TRIED TO BAIL OUT.