A Spitfire Pilot's Story: Pat Hughes: Battle of Britain Top Gun Read online

  This book is dedicated to Pat Hughes and all the others like him – men and women – who bore the brunt of the first impact of war. May they never be forgotten.

  First published in 2016

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud,

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Dennis Newton 2016

  The right of Dennis Newton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781445654140 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445654157 (eBOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typesetting and Origination by

  Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in the UK.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1: Paterson

  2: Point Cook

  3: England

  4: The Gathering Storm

  5: 234 Squadron

  6: Kathleen

  7: St Eval, July 1940

  8: The Ides Of August

  9: 15 August 1940

  10: 16 August 1940

  11: 18 August 1940

  12: 26 August 1940

  13: 4 September 1940

  14: 5 September 1940

  15: 6 September 1940

  16: 7 September 1940

  17: What Really Happened?

  18: Afterwards

  19: Pat Hughes Night

  Picture Section

  Appendix 1: New South Wales: The Ancestry of Pat Hughes

  Appendix 2: Pat Hughes’ Record of Service

  Appendix 3: Combat Claims

  Appendix 4: Distinguished Flying Cross

  Abbreviations and Ranks

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  Flight Lieutenant Paterson Clarence Hughes DFC was ranked sixth among the Royal Air Force’s highest-scoring aces of the Battle of Britain, and he was the most successful Australian pilot. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1936 and was then accepted by the Royal Air Force in 1937.

  As a flight commander in 234 Squadron, he scored the squadron’s first victories during July 1940. The burden of command fell on his shoulders before the squadron transferred to Middle Wallop, a forward airfield, in August and from there he led it into some of the heaviest fighting of the Battle of Britain. Revered by his fellow pilots, Pat began a shooting spree on 15 August that only ended when he was killed during the first huge daylight attack on London on 7 September 1940.

  He advocated bold ‘close-in’ tactics and inspired his pilots, in his last three days alone contributing at least six victories to the squadron’s tally of sixty-three. What exactly happened to him on 7 September 1940 remains uncertain but Kathleen, his bride of just six weeks, was suddenly a widow.

  This is Pat’s story …

  1

  PATERSON

  Paterson (Pat) Clarence Hughes was born on 19 September 1917 in the Cooma district of New South Wales, Australia. He was the son of Paterson (Percy) Clarence Hughes and Caroline Christina (née Vennel) and the eleventh child in a family of twelve. They were descendants of John Nichols, a convict transported to New South Wales in the First Fleet of 1787–88 (see Appendix 1: The Ancestry of Pat Hughes). Aviation entered young Pat’s life dramatically before he reached his teens.

  Cooma today is the largest town in the Snowy Mountains, generally known as the Monaro country, and is regarded as the gateway to the alpine area of New South Wales. Set within a region of rolling plains, rivers and snow-covered peaks in winter, it is located at a junction south of the national capital, Canberra, via the Monaro Highway and on the Snowy Mountains Highway connecting Bega with the Riverina. Cooma is several miles south of the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, a main tributary of the Murray–Darling River basin from which it sources its water.

  Indigenous tradition and the evidence of archaeology shows that before European settlement the aboriginals had lived in the vicinity for more than 20,000 years. By the 1800s these were mainly the Ngarigo people who camped and trekked in and out of the area in accordance with the seasons. Cooma’s name may have been derived from an indigenous word ‘Coombah’, meaning ‘big lake’ or ‘open country’.

  The region was explored in 1823 by Commander Mark John Currie RN in the colony’s never-ending quest for new pastoral land. Passing through part of what is today’s Australian Capital Territory (ACT), he traversed ‘fine forest country intersected by stony ranges’. In 1827 cattle were brought south from Sydney and the area quickly became popular with settlers. The first surveys of the area occurred in 1840 and the village of Cooma itself was surveyed in 1849.

  Discoveries of gold in the 1860s at Kiandra, forty miles to the north-west, brought about a permanent increase in Cooma’s population, and the railway opened in 1889. Cooma prospered and boomed, and by 1900 the town boasted of having the status of a ‘Regional Capital’ with numerous grand official buildings. Back in 1851, the estimated population of Cooma was forty-seven people. It grew to 2,330 in 1911, but by the early 1930s this had dropped back to just under 2,000.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the entire world became air-minded for the first time in recorded history. The exploits of record-setting pilots who were adventurers, showmen and barnstormers abounded.

  The four years of the First World War (1914–18) had brought about a revolution in early aviation. In Britain, businesses tied to the war effort, like Avro, Bristol, de Havilland and the Sopwith Aviation Company, mushroomed and flourished. Towards the end of the war Sopwith alone had four factories employing a total of 3,500 people. More than 1,000 were women. After the Armistice, the situation changed almost overnight. Military contracts stopped. Instead of needing more aircraft, the new Royal Air Force (RAF) had far too many – an overwhelming surplus. Work for the aeroplane companies dried up. For Sopwith’s older employees and the majority of the women, who had stayed on or joined the company to ‘do their bit for king and country’, it was time to depart.

  One of those who left Sopwith was Harry Kauper. He returned home to Australia after the war, and in 1919 he and another Harry, Harry Butler, formed Harry J. Butler & Kauper Aviation Co. Ltd in Adelaide, South Australia. One who stayed with Sopwith was Harry Hawker, who had come to England with Kauper before the war. Hawker by war’s end was Sopwith’s chief test pilot and a proven designer and innovator for the company to boot, but now the company needed contracts to avoid liquidation. It had to diversify, but how?

  A new organisation was devised by Tommy Sopwith and H. G. Hawker Engineering Co. Ltd was registered as a private company on 15 November 1920. As well as aircraft, it had to manufacture a wide variety of products: motorcycles, internal combustion engines, steam engines and motor cars. Sadly, Harry Hawker never saw the company that bore his name develop into one of the outstanding success stories of Britain’s aircraft industry.

  For the Aerial Derby of 1921, Hawker elected to fly a one-off, single-seat biplane racer, the Nieuport Goshawk. At Hendon on 12 July, four days before the big race, he took the Goshawk up on a test flight.
What happened next is not known exactly. The aircraft was seen to lurch in the air and it appeared as if it was trying to land, but instead it crashed and burst into flames. Harry Hawker did not survive.

  During the immediate post-war years the sight of an aeroplane was an exciting rarity in Britain, but country-wide aerial joyriding and barnstorming shows gradually led to thousands becoming familiar with the sight. In Cornwall, for example, Captain Percival Phillips, known locally as ‘P. P.’, established the Cornwall Aviation Company from his motor garage just outside Trewoon, ready for the 1924 summer season of joyrides and stunt-flying. His first aircraft was a bright red reconditioned Avro 504K biplane, G-EBIZ, that he bought for £250. It was his pride and joy and he gave it the pet name ‘Geebies’. Each summer during the late twenties and early thirties Phillips and his pilots thrilled crowds across Britain.1

  It was in America that the flying phenomenon took off. The tactical importance of aircraft was obvious by the time the US entered the war in 1917, and the hard-pressed French and British sought more planes and pilots from their new ally. America’s already vast production capacity was put to work. Thousands of flying machines began to be churned out in which thousands of young Americans were taught to fly, but Armistice Day arrived before most of these men could reach the battlefront. The energetic new aircraft industry found itself producing machines which suddenly had no useful purpose. Fliers, and aviation itself, seemed out of place. These men had been denied the excitement of flight and were dismayed at the prospect of going back to ordinary, humdrum lives. Many didn’t.

  The 1920s and 1930s in the United States became an era of freewheeling flying circuses, barnstorming shows and air races by the hundreds. America was flooded with cheap aircraft and dashing young fliers to use them. Air races and air shows captured headlines and made the names of fliers like Frank Hawks and Jimmy Doolittle familiar to the American public. Barnstorming pilots were adventurous, romantic figures clad in leather helmets and goggles, shiny riding boots and white silk scarves as they climbed out of their open cockpits. They captured the imagination with their dangerous wing walking and aerobatics.

  Hollywood came to the party in the 1920s as it began to recreate the Great War, especially the air war, on film. Barnstormers-turned-stunt pilots flew mock dogfights over Southern California, creating an image of air fighting that seemed even more dramatic, and certainly more romantic, than the real thing. The legend of the ace scout pilot was born. He was a chivalrous knight of the air, a scarf-wearing hero who lived for today because tomorrow he could die. Many still consider the air war epics they created the best movies of their day. In 1927, Wings, starring Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. A year later, Howard Hughes risked a fortune on Hell’s Angels. When Howard Hawks’ talking picture Dawn Patrol threatened to surpass it, Hughes reshot Hell’s Angels in sound and won the Oscar in 1930.

  Australia, since 1901 no longer merely a collection of separate British colonies, was caught up in the phenomenon too, and had its own pioneering aviation heroes. In 1919, the Australian Government put up a £10,000 prize for the first Australians to fly from England to Australia. Many applied. Ross Macpherson Smith and his brother Keith, both experienced former RFC and AFC pilots, approached the Vickers company to supply a Vickers Vimy, G-EAOU, a large twin-engine biplane originally designed as a bomber. In it with two sergeant mechanics, Jim Bennett and Wally Shiers, they survived severe storms over Europe and monsoons over India to land at Darwin on 10 December. The flight had taken around four weeks, but actual flying time was 135 hours 50 minutes. They won the prize and both Ross and Keith Smith were knighted. Later, Ross Smith and Jim Bennett were killed in a crash on 13 April 1922 while testing a Vickers Viking amphibian in which they were planning to make a flight around the world.

  The first woman to fly from England to Australia was Jessie ‘Chubbie’ Miller who, aged eighteen, had married a journalist named Keith Miller. The marriage did not last and a few years later Chubbie found herself alone in England. She met Bill Lancaster, an Englishman who had previously worked in Australia and was trying to finance a plan to make the first flight by a light aircraft from England to Australia. Chubbie persuaded him to take her as a passenger if she could raise half of the money required. She did, so he did!

  They bought an Avro Avian biplane (G-EBTU), named it Red Rose and on 14 October 1927 departed from Croydon in England on their epic flight. Along the way they made numerous stops, usually normal stopovers, but sometimes there had to be necessary running repairs. Some trouble was not of their making, such as a week spent quarantined in Basra due to a cholera outbreak, and on 2 January 1928, just after leaving Rangoon, a brown snake appeared from under Chubbie’s seat; Lancaster tried to kill it by stamping on it and failed, but after a hurried forced landing Chubbie finished it off. However, within a day’s flight of Darwin, the Avian’s engine failed. In the ensuing forced landing at Muntok Island, the aircraft was severely damaged. They were grounded for three months while the plane was repaired, and during that time Bert Hinkler passed them. It was he who accomplished the first flight to Australia in a light aircraft. They had missed their chance.

  Nevertheless, on arriving in Darwin at 2.30 p.m. on 19 March, they received a message of congratulations from Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, and Chubbie gained renown as the first female passenger to fly to Australia. They arrived at Mascot in Sydney at 5.20 p.m. on 31 March at the conclusion of an aerial pageant and derby, where they were welcomed by a large crowd. They and Red Rose were celebrities, and over the following months there were tours and visits throughout New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

  Another major record was set on 9 June when a Fokker F.VII/3m tri-motor aircraft by the name of the ‘Southern Cross’ landed at Brisbane airport, Queensland. It had just made the remarkable epic first crossing of the Pacific Ocean by air from Oakland, California, to Australia. Its crew consisted of Charles Kingsford Smith (pilot), Charles Ulm (co-pilot), Harry Lyon (navigator) and James Warner (radio operator). After enjoying the excitement and kudos of their achievement, Kingsford Smith and Ulm would form Australian National Airways (ANA) the following December. The two Americans, Harry Lyon and Jim Warner, spent a couple of weeks in Sydney after landing in Brisbane before boarding a ship to return to the USA.

  Meanwhile, Bill Lancaster and Chubbie Miller were back in Sydney again and on 13 June, four days after the ‘Southern Cross’ reached Australia, they departed from Mascot for a three-hour flight to Cooma in alpine New South Wales as part of their promotional tour. When they took off there was an ominous cracking sound, but they continued on their way. As the plane was landing on Cooma Racecourse, a wing spar collapsed but they touched down safely. Neither Chubbie nor Bill suffered any injuries but the Red Rose would need a major repair.2 They might have had to go back to Sydney by train to continue with their other plans, but before that they were entertained at the Blue Bird Tea Rooms, which was run by the local Country Women’s Association to raise funds for a local maternity hospital.

  The enthusiastic people of Cooma came from miles around to gaze at the plane and welcome the two fliers. Among them were members of the Hughes family from Peak Hill. It was an exciting occasion for everyone, including young Pat Hughes, who was by then a boisterous and impressionable youngster almost eleven years old.

  When the aviators left, Chubbie left behind a souvenir, her old flying helmet which, in all likelihood, she would not need again – not for a while anyway. It was retrieved by Pat’s older brother, Charles, and to this day it remains a treasured possession of the Hughes family.3

  The Avro Avian was sold to a Mr R. A. Charlton. On the following 23 June, Chubbie Miller and Bill Lancaster left Sydney aboard the SS Sonoma bound for San Francisco. With them were Kingsford Smith’s former radio operator Jim Warner and navigator, and Harry Lyon. Lancaster and Miller had been engaged by Lyon to assist him in obtaining a prospective motion picture contract. In the arrangement, they were
to fly Lyon’s aircraft but the deal apparently fell through.

  Although Chubbie had been a passenger for the journey to Australia, Bill had taught her the rudiments of flying. In the USA, she graduated as a pilot at the Red Bank School, New Jersey, and later became a record-setting flier in her own right.

  *

  Jock Goodwin grew up in the Cooma district and was a schoolboy in the late 1920s at Cooma Public School. He remembered the Hughes family from Peak Hill when interviewed in 2011.4

  Pat was younger than me. He was one or two classes behind. One of his sisters was in the same class as me, Connie. The next girl was a year ahead and the next boy a year ahead of that again. There were twelve of them. I only knew the younger ones.

  Those younger ones left Cooma long before they were married.

  I understand, I could be wrong, I understand he was named after Banjo Paterson.

  My family was one of the earliest settlers on the Monaro. My mother’s family was there in the 1830s, I think. My father’s family – I think they got to Australia in 1842 and they settled up around there.

  My mother was the youngest in a family of eleven. They were all big families in those days. What else could they do? No television in those days. Excuse my quaint way of putting it.

  Q: ‘Were you living in town?’

  No, we were living on a property twenty odd miles out of town. That had quite a history, but that’s not what you’re after. My mother’s father come out I think as an orphan boy with some wealthy graziers. He took up a bit of country himself and gradually built it up until we had quite a big area.

  Q:‘How did you get to school?’

  In those early days we had a governess and, I just can’t remember what age, in about fifth class – what age would you be then, about nine or ten or something? I lived with an uncle and auntie about five miles out of town and rode a horse to school. That’s when I came into contact with the Hughes family.

  Q: ‘Where were they at this stage?’