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

extraordinarily calm in the plane,’ he says, ‘even when there were fighters
and flak around us, but you had to be like this.’
Certainly all the best pilots shared this attribute. Hans-Ekkehard Bob
says he always felt in complete control in his aircraft and that adrenalin
prevented him from feeling scared. Pete Brothers reckoned experienced
pilots developed a kind of sixth sense. ‘You’d get the feeling that someone
was looking at you,’ he says, which would make him look round in time to
take evasive action. The difficulty for the sprogs – as new pilots were
known in the RAF – was that flying these machines was still a
comparatively new experience. When Pete Brothers or Hans-Ekkehard Bob
got into their planes they knew precisely what their machines were capable
of and in the heat of battle could manoeuvre their aircraft without having to
think about what they were doing. For men new to action it was a
completely bewildering, frightening and alien experience, and apart from
the especially cool-headed most tended to panic, then not to be able to make
informed decisions, so they were invariably shot down.
Familiarity with one’s aircraft combined with experience also helped
the better pilots to get more from their machines. Pete Brothers was
fortunate enough to be taught by a First World War ace who told him that
when he was about to black out he should put his head on his shoulder,
which stopped there being such a direct flow of blood from the head. ‘It
slows the blacking-out process down,’ says Pete. ‘Enables you to pull
another couple of g before you pass out. I used to tell the chaps in the
squadron.’ He also learned other tricks. ‘Suppose you see tracer passing on
your left,’ he says. ‘The instinct is to turn away from it. The chap who is
shooting will have noticed that he is flying to the left of you and he will be
correcting his aim. Trick him – go through where he is firing and you’ll
collect a few holes but you’ll throw him off his aim.’ Pete always used to
wind a bit of rudder trim, so that his Hurricane was always yawing, or
crabbing, slightly. He felt it helped put any would-be attacker slightly off
his aim.
Pete believes that experience was the key to survival and points out that
in 32 Squadron not a single pre-war pilot lost his life that summer. ‘People
were shot down,’ he says, ‘but no-one was killed. It was always the new
boys that got the chop.’ In many ways he was right, but battle fatigue was
also a merciless killer. ‘Fighting was tiring,’ says Bee Beamont. ‘It was all
cumulative. The weeks went by and the pressure never stopped, and then