The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

few engagements, to discover a sudden inexplicably empty sky. Panic now
gripped him again and finding himself over the sea some miles north of
Dunkirk his training and nerve deserted him. Rather than calmly thinking
about the course he needed to take to get back to the Thames estuary, he
blindly set out in what he thought was roughly the right direction. Driven
by an overwhelming urge to land back on dry land, he pressed on, all
calmness and good sense gone. He knew he was heading north and that that
was the wrong direction so he turned around, vainly hoping that by
returning to Dunkirk he would get his bearings. The sight of the French
coast and two ships steaming below kicked some sense into him, however,
and forcing himself to work out this simple navigational problem he
managed to set a course west and soon the English coastline appeared ahead
of him.
As he flew low down the estuary and past Southend pier, he realized he
was soaked with sweat. And as he touched down at last, the abject fear and
panic were, in an instant, gone, replaced instead by a sense of jubilation and
exhilaration that, at the age of nearly twenty, he was now a fighter pilot who
had tangled with the enemy – and survived.
And it was the young man back on land who wrote to his mother a few
days later with the kind of nonchalance becoming of a fighter pilot. ‘Dear
Mummy,’ he scrawled, ‘No more major excitements since I last wrote to
you. We are doing lots of offensive patrols over the battle area, always
going across with all the machines we can get into the air and in company
with several other squadrons: in fact, the air becomes black with Spitfires
and Brother Bosche is not so ready to bomb our troops and ships.’ He then
gave her a breathless description of the action – ‘he dived like a rocket and I
pumped a lot of lead into his starboard mainplane’ – and finished his letter
telling her there was no need to worry about him or his older brother, John,
who was also a fighter pilot. ‘I am quite certain that our Spitfires are the
finest machines flying over Belgium now,’ he added cheerfully. It is
unlikely she felt very reassured.
While the vast amount of smoke was helping the British cause, so too was
the weather. After weeks of largely fine, dry weather, a front was now
inching over the Channel and northern France. By the evening of Tuesday,
28 May, visibility was deteriorating and with it came rain. Heavy cloud and