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

further operation. It meant sending all three Gruppen over for a fourth
mission in one day. This was a lot – more than could be reasonably
expected. Fighter Command pilots were by now automatically given fortyeight
hours’ leave every two weeks, and, of course, were rotated out of the
front line. Very few German units were withdrawn for rest and refit – not
now, at any rate, and there was certainly no system of weekly or fortnightly
leave. German pilots were expected to simply keep going. Moreover,
British pilots were mostly flying over their own country. The culture within
Fighter Command was such that getting away from it all once stood down
for the day was actively encouraged. They could head to a pub, where they
would be greeted as heroes. The German pilots were operating on foreign
turf, however. Most got on well enough with the French and Belgians, but it
was not the same. Siegfried Bethke noticed that the Belgian people
employed in the kitchen and elsewhere around Mordyck were noticeably
quiet. He wondered what they thought of it all. ‘Before, there were lots of
English here,’ he mused, ‘and then all those Stuka attacks nearby, huge fires
and destruction, and now the Germans who take off from here fly towards
London.’
The stress and strain of keeping up that level of intense air fighting was
immense, and as well as flying over England three or four times a day, they
were still regularly being bombed by marauding Blenheims. On their
second morning at Mordyck, Siegfried Bethke and his fellows were shaken
when a Blenheim came over early and dropped a number of bombs over
them. As Hans-Ekkehard Bob points out, there was another meaning to
Kanalkrank. ‘It also means your nerves are shot,’ he says, ‘and you simply
cannot fly any more.’ At Coquelles, Ulrich Steinhilper noticed that the
evening debates were becoming increasingly heated and that tempers had
started to fray. One evening, Hinnerk Waller, one of their pilots, became so
upset he stormed out of the tent, threatening to shoot himself. ‘The strain of
unrelenting front-line flying,’ noted Ulrich, ‘was beginning to show.’