Spitfires in flight: a relatively rare contemporary British image.
Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary left a vivid portrait of life in a front line Squadron during the Battle of Britain, including his experience of being shot down on the 3rd of September:
I was peering anxiously ahead, for the controller had given us warning of at least fifty enemy fighters approaching very high. When we did first sight them, nobody shouted, as I think we all saw them at the same moment. They must have been 500 to 1000 feet above us and coming straight on like a swarm of locusts. The next moment we were in among them and it was each man for himself.
As soon as they saw us they spread out and dived, and the next ten minutes was a blur of twisting machines and tracer bullets. One Messerschmitt went down in a sheet of flame on my right, and a Spitfire hurtled past in a half-roll; I was heaving and turning in a desperate attempt to gain height, with the machine practically hanging on the airscrew.
Then, just below me and to my left, I saw what I had been praying for – a Messerschmitt climbing and away from the sun. I closed in to 200 yards, and from slightly to one side gave him a two-second burst: fabric ripped off the wing and black smoke poured from the engine, but he did not go down. Like a fool, I did not break away, but put in another three-second burst. Red flames shot upwards and he spiralled out of sight.
At that moment, I felt a terrific explosion which knocked the control stick from my hand, and the whole machine quivered like a stricken animal. In a second, the cockpit was a mass of flames: instinctively, I reached up to open the hood. It would not move. I tore off my straps and managed to force it back; but this took time, and when I dropped back into the seat and reached for the stick in an effort to turn the plane on its back, the heat was so intense that I could feel myself going. I remember a second of sharp agony, remember thinking “So this is it!” and putting both hands to my eyes. Then I passed out.
Burnt to the face and hands, Hillary was to endure a series of operations with the pioneering plastic surgeon Archie McIndoe, becoming one of the early members of the Guinea Pig Club. It was while he was recuperating that he wrote his classic memoir ‘The Last Enemy’, which brought him considerable acclaim. Despite his injuries he persuaded the RAF to let him return to flying. He died in an air crash in early 1943.
See Richard Hillary: The Last Enemy
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The commander of a Royal Navy submarine at the periscope as he prepares to launch torpedoes.
The Royal Navy submarine HMS Sturgeon was patrolling between Denmark and Norway when she spotted a military transport being escorted by smaller craft. It was the 3624 tonne troopship Pionier taking troops to Norway. The log of the Sturgeon records:
At 19.39 a large transport could be seen escorted by a “T”-class torpedo boat on either bow. There were some smaller vessels astern. Two torpedoes were fired at 19.53 from a range of 6000 yards. The target was silhouetted against the sun. One explosion was heard at 19.58 and when the periscope was raised a dense column of black smoke was seen rising from the target to a height of about 2000 feet. The small vessels astern of “Pionier” scattered and no attack on them was possible. “Sturgeon” went deep to reload her torpedo tubes at 21.15 and at that time “Pionier” was burning furiously and settling low in the water.
When HMS Sturgeon surfaced at 22.30 the ‘Pionier’ had disappeared.
The submarine HMS Sturgeon in 1940
The crew of HMS Sturgeon following their return to port in September 1940 - Lieutenant G.D.A. Gregory, the commander, is standing fifth from left. He was promoted following this patrol, which was his last with Sturgeon.
The Kutno ghetto in central Poland - on the 15th June 1940 the Germans had forced the 8,000 Jewish inhabitants of Kutno onto the site of a bomb damaged sugar factory.
Having pushed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto into a state of destitution, the Germans now took a series of propaganda images to demonstrate the 'inferior nature' of the Jews.
In the Warsaw ghetto Chaim Kaplan had been keeping a diary of the effects of the war on the Poles and the ever growing persecution of the Jews. He recorded the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war:
In this year of torments, Polish Jewry has been destroyed. Its property and holdings were confiscated; all sources of income were blocked; its ancient communities were uprooted and exiled; its cemeteries are piles of rubble; its human rights have been erased and annulled; its lives are worthless. Imprisoned, subjugated, and mummified in the narrow confines of ghettos, it is declining to the lowest level of human survival.
This is an existence of dogs who lick bones under their masters’ feet. Spiritual life is paralysed. All the libraries, academies, and other buildings which were a haven for the Jewish spirit have been destroyed, and still the enemy is poised to torment us until we disappear from the earth entirely.
This is not only in our own conquered country where we have been openly enslaved by the Nazis; the venom of Nazism is poisoning all the communities where the murderers have power. Depraved Rumania, wicked Hungary, audacious and filthy Czechoslovakia—wherever the influence of Nazism reaches, we decline from day to day.
‘You Jews wanted a war—well, here is a war; but you will come out of it beaten!’
All of this in a single year. We were mistaken in assessing the murderers’ strength, and were again mistaken in assessing our democratic strength. And all the small and great nations who have become working tributaries to Nazism were mistaken along with us. Together with the Jewish people, Poland too is turned into a cemetery.
See The Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan
In Kutno, as in many other ghettos, malnourishment and the cold would prove fatal to many, as the winter soon dramatically worsened living conditions.
