22. The Remaining Few

I was running down my list of questions. I knew from my reading, that during the Battle of Britain Bob Doe was credited with 14 1/ 2 kills: making him one of the highest scoring Aces during the Battle. As a policy, Fighter Command frowned upon the practice of recognizing individual records, as opposed to the Germans, who tended to glorify personal triumph, often at the expense of the squadron. That was deep rooted in the God-like status of the Red Baron in World War I. And while it was the British press that felt the need to glorify the flyers, among themselves, the pilots considered it bad form to brag about their exploits: “Line shooting” as they referred to it.

When I asked Bob Doe about the planes that he had shot down he simply acknowledged that the number was accurate. I think I phrased it in some innocuous way; avoiding the term “Kills”. Like most of the young men who chose to hurl themselves around the sky in metal crates at 360 m.p.h. Bob Doe was a gentle warrior. He, and the others, did what they had to do because, quite frankly, there was no other choice. Many pilots recounted that they weren’t trying to kill the man; they were trying to destroy the plane. The Poles and Czechs who flew for the RAF, on the other hand, took things much more personally. For them it was a chance for retribution.

I glanced over at my notepad on the table to search for a good question. “You flew both Spitfires and Hurricanes. How many physically did you have… Where you had to bail out or crash land?”

He got quite still. I feared I had crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed. He looked down at the table and shook his head.

“God knows. I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Bailing out of a plane must be tricky enough under the best of circumstances. I don’t imagine that there were many of those scenarios involved in combat. You had to remember to unfasten your straps, unhook your oxygen mask and communications lines from your flying helmet and then, if all was going according to procedure, you would slide back the canopy, roll the plane upside down, and fall out of the plane. That doesn’t account for the possibility that the plane is on fire, you get caught on something, you’re injured or that someone is shooting at you. Oh yeah… and pray your chute opens. If you survive all of that you automatically become a member of the Caterpillar Club: as in silk worms. Ergo, “Hitting the silks.” Bob Doe is a member.

Just after noon on October 10, while flying a Hurricane with 238 Squadron over Dorset he got tangled up with a BF109. Wounded in the leg and shoulder, and with a crippled airplane, Bob Doe had to bail out. His Hurricane crashed near the 1000-year old Corfe Castle. The battle diary for that day listed 8 aircraft damaged or destroyed with 6 pilots killed and one wounded. Twelve days later Bob Doe received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Only one medal, the Victoria Cross, is more honored; and only one of those was awarded to Fighter Command during the entire war.

Two months later he was flying again. And then on January 3, 1941 while returning from a night sortie the oil in his plane froze and the engine stopped. He crashed into a snow-covered field at 160 m.p.h. His harness snapped and he broke his arm. That was the least of his injuries. His face smashed into the gun sight obliterating his nose and knocking one of his eyes out of its socket. Doctors were able to reset the eye and he was placed under the care of Dr. Harold Gillies, who arguably was the Father of Plastic Surgery. While at Park Prewett Hospital Bob Doe underwent 20 surgeries just to regain the ability to talk and eat properly. He was even allowed to pick out a new nose from pictures of various styles in a book.

With a piece of his hip now forming the boney bridge of his new nose he walked out of the hospital four months after his horrific crash and rejoined his squadron.

Of course he mentioned none of this to me. I wouldn’t learn about his personal sacrifices and suffering until well afterward. So for the moment I was left hanging with a discomfited silence that seemed to last as long as it probably took to read that explanation.

Thankfully Betty, perhaps sensing trouble, or else trying to extract me from my awkwardness, came to the rescue.

“You didn’t always have the same plane….” She volunteered; deftly steering us back on course and away from the conversational rocks.

“I nearly always had the same plane.” He seemed to brighten up again. “Occasionally it had to be serviced or repaired.”

Crisis averted. Betty has been a real lifesaver throughout this process. I suspect that is in both the literal and figurative senses. She was a natural editor for Bob’s remembrances. I’m sure she has sat in that same chair across from me on countless afternoons as Bob recounted his life to other captivated audiences. She was a trusted partner in the business of “Bob Doe – Fighter Pilot”. I knew that he was in very capable hands having her by his side.

As we talked Betty would unapologetically light a cigarette as though we were back in 1940’s London, sitting around a cozy table at the Savoy Hotel or taking a break between dances at the Hammersmith Palias. I found it rather charming. She refilled my glass with a spot more Brandy and put the kettle on for tea which she served up with a plate of absolutely mouth-watering biscuits (cookies). She arranged the flowers that I had brought in a crystal vase and set them on the counter near us. While she tended to us Bob signed a print for me of a pastel portrait of him as a young pilot.

I commented on the American pilots penchant for painting the name of their girl, or some other form of nose art, on their plane. I had noticed in pictures that the British planes seemed devoid of that.

“Some people used to put the number of swastikas on the side that you’d shot down. I never did.” I could sense that he viewed that as a visual form of “Line shooting”.

“I always had a ‘D’ on my plane. ‘D’ for Doe.” That sounded like something I would do. I don’t know if it’s superstition or just something neat to do. Even now I wear “90” on my ice hockey jersey because it was my number when I played football in high school: Just a year or two younger than many of those pilots. It was probably the only thing that I would be able to empathize with. I joined his smile with one of my own.

“One of the nicest things that happened, I think, during the Battle of Britain, was on one occasion – as I told you… we had no C.O. and no “A” Flight Commander at all – they posted a new C.O. in and… he came up as my #2 on his first sortie. We eventually came across a JU-88 over Winchester area, or somewhere. I shot this thing down (laughs). I say I shot it down because I was the only one near it. It crashed in a field not far from the airfield.”

There must have been a bit of personal (and professional) satisfaction involved with that. I’m not certain how things worked in the RAF but I imagine that if I shot down a German bomber in front of my boss she would be very impressed, to say the least.

The imagine of the bomber, burning away in the field, reminded me of something that I hadn’t thought of in probably 30 years. I told them about the English Literature book that my mother had when she was going to school in Mississippi. It had obviously been published in the early ‘40s because when you opened up the cover, there inside, across two pages was a painting of a JU-88 that had just crashed in a field. Flames licked the outside of the mangled fuselage with the swastika was still emblazoned on the tail fin.

Bob eyes danced with the image; both his and mine. He laughs. “How lovely… (still laughing)… How lovely.”

He sighed. It was a relaxed and satisfying gesture. I looked for a sign that he was getting tired of reliving his experiences but to the contrary I think he actually pulled strength from doing so. We were soon back up at 20,000 feet again, a smoldering JU-88 scattered across a field in southern England below.

“…. I got a bullet through my main spar in the process. The weird thing is – when you’re coming up behind an aeroplane to shoot at it: the Germans used a lot of tracers… and when the tracer starts out it comes straight towards you and as it gets close to you it goes past.” He held his finger out from an arm’s length away and brought it straight back toward his beautifully reconstructed nose as he described the sensation of being fired on. At the last moment he passed his finger past his ear.

“It’s really a funny feeling.”

I would hopefully have to take his word for that. In my relatively cloistered life-experience I have never thought to use the word “funny” in the same sentence describing being shot at.

“You get down deeper behind the engine, you know, because the engine would stop most things.”

Note to self: In the event of gunfire, dive behind a 1200 h.p. Rolls Royce Merlin V12 engine.

“The interesting thing was, on this incident where I had a bullet through my main spar – there was an RAF; not RAF… a Spitfire repair place down at Hombolt which was sort of a grass airfield near Southampton. I was asked if I would fly my aeroplane down there the next day to get it repaired.”

The defense of Britain was augmented by the use of the Civilian Repair Organization. These journeymen; many from British Railways, repaired almost 4200 planes during the Battle of Britain. Often times salvaging parts from crashed planes. 60% of the aircraft that they eventually rebuilt had been written off as total losses by the air stations.

“It was flyable. Not safely flyable… A bullet through the main spar, it wouldn’t really be would it? Anyway, I flew it down there. It was a lovely day. At that time we were so tired. My over riding memory of the Battle of Britain was tiredness. Over-whelming tiredness. We didn’t much sleep, and I think it could have a lot to do with tension as well, you know. The two go together don’t they?”

“I arrived there and the first thing I do is went to sleep on the grass. It was a civilian place with civilian people doing all the work; and the foreman – a nice man, came over to me, where I was asleep on the grass and said, would I like to come home and meet his wife and have dinner with them.”

These early days of the war were not simply the Battle of Britain. In fact, the German never referred to this phase of the war as that. To them it was, “Kanalkampf” (Battle of the Channel). For the English; and you must include the Scots, Welsh and Irish, it was a battle for Britain. Everyone shared in the affects and hardships brought about by the Luftwaffe’s campaign.

On August 24th two German bombers, off-course and lost in a nighttime fog, jettisoned their payloads before turning for their bases in France. Unfortunately they happened to be over a blacked-out London at the time: and the Fuehrer had expressly forbidden the capitol city to be bombed. Churchill repaid the favor with two nights of bombing raids on Berlin. Göering had to eat his words. Many Berliners, having grown tired of the Reichsmarschall’s swaggering boasts, took him at his word and began referring to him as “Meyer.”

When Göering asked his top fighter ace, Adolf Gallant, what he would need to defeat the RAF, Gallant responded, “A squardon of Spitfires.”

Enraged by the indignity of the Berlin attacks, Hitler ordered the full-scale bombing of London to commence. What had begun as attacks on coastal radar and airfields turned into the indiscriminate bombing of cities and civilians. On September 4th, Hitler ordered the first raids on London. The Blitz was about to begin.

On September 15th, what be be later known as the Battle of Britain Day, Göering launched the entire might of the Luftwaffe against England. At one point every plane that Fighter Command had was in the air. This was literally, Do or Die.

Bob Doe did not see action that day. Reflecting on 234 Squadron he recounted just how quickly things transpired during the Battle. “We were out in just under 28 days because we only had 3 pilots left.” He paused and then felt the need, I’m sure, to re-assure me. “They weren’t all killed.”

Fighter Command had won the day. On the 17th, Hitler cancelled plans for Operation Sea Lion. Bombs would continue to rain down on London, Manchester, Liverpool and the other cities and towns throughout England. But never again with the intention being to eliminate the RAF. Instead, Hitler now hoped that by bombing the cities, the people would turn against Churchill and the war. He was grossly underestimating the will of the British.

Bob Doe would return to action. He would survive countless crashes and agonizingly brutal injuries. The Summer of battles over the fields of England gave way to increased forays over German-held territory. The RAF was now taking to fight to Hitler. 1940 turned to 41. America was still a year away from joining the war.

In May he was promoted to Flight Commander and posted to No: 66 Squadron and after three months joined No: 130 Squadron on August 18th. Later that year, on October 22nd he was posted to 57 O.T.U. (Operational Training Unit) as an instructor. On June 9th 1943 Doe went to the Fighter Leaders School, at Milfield and then joined No: 118 Squadron at Coltishall in July. He then joined No: 613 Squadron in August until October when he was posted to Burma. In December 1943 he was tasked with forming No: 10 (Indian Air Force) Squadron and commanded it throughout the Burma campaign until April 1945.

“We were flying Hurricanes carrying two, 500 lbs. bombs and four cannons. It’s like flying a barge. I don’t know how else to describe it.” He laughed hard. “As an airplane it was useless…but it did the job.” He gave a satisfied and definite punctuation to that staement.

“We were dropping bombs 50 yards from our own troops. In the middle of the jungle. So your map reading had to be pretty accurate.”

“That’s precision bombing.” I marveled.

“It was. It was. Precisely.”

Their orders were to give close support of the ground troops and to stop the Japanese advance. With the formal surrender of Japan On August 15th, 1945 it was all over. Six weeks later, on October 2nd Bob Doe received the Indian DSO, one of only two men to be honored with this award.

Almost seven years to the day from the start of the war, Bob Doe finally returned home to his beloved England and his mum’s backyard; The one that he was just trying to keep “those Bastards” from coming into. The gardener’s son from Surrey, the 17-year-old boy that memorized the Moment of the Arm retired from the RAF on April 1st, 1966 having obtained the rank of Wing Commander.

Epilogue: 2,917 men flew in the Battle of Britain against the Germans. As of May 28, 2006, 150 are still alive. Bob Doe is one of the remaining few.