2 – 2 = 0

2 – 2 = 0 – The RAF fighter Command made no money with me as a fighter pilot as the fabulous score of two ME 109’s which I shot down was equated to my being shot down upon two occasions, and both times the kites were written off.

The first ME 109 which I shot down (July 8, 1941, and confirmed by Billie Raine) was in a beehive over the Lille area of France. I spent too much time on the guy’s tail before I got the sights of my kite out in front of him and I was lucky that I was not clobbered myself and I remember that I gave him about a two second burst of the small bore. The 109 was afire and the pilot bailed out. In this particular melee we lost two pilots.

The second 109 which I clobbered (August 21 and confirmed by Georgie and Dixie) was over the Chotques area. I managed to get underneath him when he was in a light turn and then I raked him with a belly-burst. The 109 went straight up, then spun down belching smoke and, as far as I could follow, the pilot didn’t get out. George and Dix said that the pilot’s head was slumped to the side. We lost four pilots that morning.

Although I had had bullet and shell holes in my aircraft on more occasions than I would care to relate, the first time that I was really clobbered and shot down was when the Squadron was top cover for a flight of four-engine Stirling bombers on their way to bomb the chemical works at Lille (July 19, 1941). We were jumped by ME 109’s and they stayed around to fight. Usually they came down with initial airspeed for an attack, took their cracks in a few seconds and then buggered off on down. I pulled the cardinal sin of staying too long on a 109’s tail and just when I was getting my sights out in front of him – WHAM – I caught a packet. Immediately I was undoing things to get out of the cockpit, as I quickly decided that I was going to have control troubles and I didn’t want to be a sitting duck. But there was no smoke and the aircraft dove in a descending arc. Something ran through my brain, “Philpotts, take it easy.” As far as I could see, I was, now, all by myself in the sky and I settled back into the cockpit. A quick check showed that the starboard aileron was hanging by an outer tip and my Spit kept in a continuous bank to the starboard side. I managed, however, to get the kite straightened out by forcing my forearm between the pip¬squeak (an auto-matic transmitter on the starboard side of the cockpit) and the control column, and I gingerly applied full left trim to the rudder. There were many pinholes made by tiny fragments of shrapnel in the starboard side of the cockpit and, as I found out later, in me. I recall a very quick, hot, pricky burn at the time. The engine was about to stop, evidently, because of holes in the glycol and oil rads. I tried to glide the Spit at about 145 mph indicated airspeed, as this was supposed to be near the efficient distance-speed ratio for a gliding a Spitfire, and I wanted to go as far as I could across the Channel. Indeed, I wanted to return my Spitfire to England. As I was about to cross the French coastline, two 109’s dove on me and I released my numb forearm from between the pipsqueak and the control column and I let the kite go into a mean starboard turn at the opportune second. The 109’s broke on down and I never saw them again. Had these greenhorns come up underneath me they would have seen that I was a lame duck. I was able to cross the English coast in the Bexhill area at a height of about 150 feet over the beach. But as I lowered the gliding speed to attempt a forced landing in a pasture field dead ahead, I couldn’t hold the kite from going into a steep banking turn and the field which I originally picked was, now, out of the question. The starboard wingtip hit the ground and the empennage broke off (as I found out later on). The remainder of the kite, with me in it, jumped a ten foot ditch and we finished up writing off a couple of cows.

The complete underside of the starboard mainplane was shot away and the four machine guns were hanging (as related by the Calgary Highlanders who were working on the beach when I crossed over). A dispatch rider of the Highlanders managed to get to the site, tied my hands around his neck, and took me on the pinion of his motorbike to the nearest medical help. (I was never able to remember getting out of the cockpit and onto the pinion seat.) The medical aid came at the home of an old retired doctor and his wife. The dispatch rider and the doctor’s wife laid me out on, of all things, a beautiful, old fashioned couch in the living room. Later on I ate a fresh egg, other than powdered egg, for the first time in over a year, and, believe it or not, I was given a piece of chocolate cake, freshly home baked; I was in heaven. The dispatch rider said that a lady on the farm had seen me get out of the crashed kite and she was calling for help. She, evidently, kept asking me how I was but she kept backing away from me because my face was a mass of blood which flowed from cuts on my head (probably after hitting my head on the gun-sight). The Sutton harness was tightened down rigidly before I crashed and it was amazing to me how my body compacted to the degree that my head and upper torso could be forced so far forward in the tightened harness; this, probably, explained the muscle damage to my back.

When I was taken back to our little hospital, the salvage officer came to see me as he wanted to see a living ghost. (Some friend, eh?) He said that if I hadn’t been killed by the shells and shrapnel, I should have been killed by the crash. And if I hadn’t been killed by the crash, I should have been burned to death, but the Spit did not burn. It was the last statement in which he had interest. He wanted to know if I remembered anything that I did specifi¬cally that might have had bearing on keeping the aircraft from burning. I told him that I had run the petrol dry from the tanks to the engine and had switched off the mags on the descending glide and that the engine was stone cold. But I believed that I was extremely lucky that the self-sealing petrol tanks, someway or other, stayed whole through the entire fiasco.

A second episode of being shot down occurred as I was leading Bart Bartholomew back towards Westhampnett after we had escorted an air-sea rescue Lysander aircraft which had dropped emergency materials to a fighter pilot in the drink a few miles off Dungeness. We were stooging along inside the coast with complete confidence of safety when we were taken by surprise by two ME 109’s. They made their attack with much initial airspeed and then they kept on going. One of them got the glycol rad on my aeroplane, among other damage. With the encouragement of Bart circling overhead, I managed to pancake into a relatively large sized field a number of miles west. At the end of the skid of the belly landing, flames were licking at the bottom of the cockpit and my left trouser leg started to burn. In trying to beat this out, my gauntlets were set afire. (The pure silk gloves which I wore under my leather gauntlets, evidently, saved my hands and forearms.) As I rapidly got out of the hissing kite a most ridiculous thing happened, and I was embarrassed to the very core. Many, many times I had sat in the cockpit of a Spitfire and religiously went through routine emergency actions of undoing this and undoing that in order to quickly get out of the cockpit if I ever had to do so. Well, I got out of the cockpit with much haste alright and started to run from the about¬-to-burn Spitfire when, all of a sudden, my head jerked back viciously and I landed with a resounding THUMP on my back on the ground. I had undone everything except the bloody oxygen hose which was one of those crinkly types which stretched like a long snake for many feet. Oh happy August 16.