Chapter 13 - Their Finest Hour

You catch him right smack in the middle of your sights and give him a complete burst. The Brownings go to work, and, brother, when they are working they’re not kidding! Eight guns, 1,400 rounds per minute. Figure it out for yourself.
Eugene Tobin, 609 Squadron

Aircrews stretched away their fatigue and hooked starter batteries to 609 Squadron’s Spitfires, standing silhouetted in the dawn light near the bungalow that doubled as the dispersal hut. A few hundred yards away, Eugene Tobin lay in deep slumber in his quarters.

“I say, old boy, better wake up.”

Pilot Officer Johnny “Dogs” Dundas was trying to shake Tobin awake. “I say, old boy, you really must pull yourself together.”

Tobin opened his eyes.

Dundas yawned, still dressed in his bathrobe.

“What’s the idea?” said Tobin groggily. “Why do I have to get up at this ungodly hour?”

“I’m not sure, old boy, but they say there’s an invasion on, or something.” Tobin leapt out of bed. “We didn’t know then that September 15, 1940 was going to go down as the biggest day in the history of the Royal Air Force,” Tobin recalled, “[and] that never before had so many planes filled the sky in aerial combat; that more than 500 planes would be zooming and diving in the fighting over London.”

Tobin dressed quickly and then sprinted out to the airfield. For the next two hours, he and his fellow 609 pilots flew above London, seeing familiar landmarks and still-smoldering fires below but no action. Meanwhile, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park was seated opposite his wife, Dol, at the breakfast table in their home, a stone’s throw from his office: the so-called bunker—Fighter Command’s Sector 11 operations control room. It was not a good start to the day. Dol said something about it being her birthday. Park had forgotten. He apologized. Dol understood—he had been rather busy recently. Never mind. “A good bag of German aircraft would be an excellent present,” she told him. MORE