ABSTRACT

The Germans date their ‘Battle of England’ from August 8th. The dew of the airfield grass still dampening their flying boots, Pilot Officer C. A. Cooke, Pilot Officer J. Mather and Sergeant F. W. Robertson had climbed to 17,000 feet at twenty-to-five in the morning. The unlucky bomber fell to Sergeant Robertson’s guns. The nightmare possibility of having, one day, to make an escape in similar circumstances was always in fighter pilots’ minds. The civil servants, bless them, had been having a rough time in the unwonted rush. Bounced on the one hand by Beaverbrook into taking action before the Minutes could catch up with the spoken word, they had also been adjured by Churchill—Jack the Jargon Killer, the Manchester Guardian named him—to forget their officialese. The rapid removal of some of the Air Ministry’s time-honoured functions was one of the heaviest pieces of toe-treading the service departments of Whitehall have ever experienced.