Friendly fire in the first days of the war

The first British fighter pilot to be killed in the Second World War was not shot down by a German. On the morning of 6 September 1939, over Essex and Suffolk, Spitfires of No. 74 Squadron RAF attacked Hurricanes of No. 56 Squadron, having taken them for German bombers. Two aircraft went down, and Pilot Officer Montague Hulton-Harrop was killed. Four days later, on 10 September, off the coast of Norway, the British submarine Triton torpedoed another British submarine, the Oxley. Two men survived. She was the first submarine lost in the war. Both tragedies had the same roots: the tension of the first days of the war, inexperience, and imperfect means of telling friend from foe.

Both incidents are usually described accurately. Only the figures need to be made more precise. Popular chronologies speak of eleven Hurricanes mistaken for the enemy; according to British accounts, No. 56 Squadron scrambled fourteen aircraft, followed by two reserve machines, and it was these two that were shot down. The Oxley sank on the evening of 10 September; 53 of the 55 men on board were killed.

False alarm over Essex

In the first days of the war Britain expected massed Luftwaffe raids. As early as 3 September, a quarter of an hour or so after the radio broadcast in which Neville Chamberlain announced that the country was at war with Germany, the sirens wailed over London. According to the explanations given at the time, the alarm had been set off by a French aircraft whose flight had not been reported. The country’s air defence rested on the system built by the commander of RAF Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding: the Chain Home radar stations on the coast, observer posts, operations rooms and radio control of fighters from the ground. In theory it was the most modern air defence system in the world. In practice nobody had yet tested it in a real war.

At around 6.15 a.m. on 6 September No. 11 Fighter Group headquarters received a report of unidentified aircraft approaching over the estuary of the River Blackwater in Essex, near West Mersea. Sources differ on its origin: according to some, it came from a searchlight battery that had mistaken a lone British aircraft returning from patrol for the enemy; according to others, it was a false plot on a radar screen. The Chain Home radars of the day could not always tell whether an echo came from an aircraft in front of the aerial or behind it, so aircraft flying over land could appear as a formation approaching from the sea. Hurricanes of No. 56 Squadron were scrambled from North Weald. The sector controller, Group Captain David Lucking, sent up the whole squadron, fourteen aircraft, and two more pilots took off in reserve machines and followed some distance behind the rest.

Now the radar was seeing real aircraft – British ones – and identified them as hostile. The alarm grew. Hurricanes of No. 151 Squadron and Spitfires of Nos. 54, 65 and 74 Squadrons took off from Hornchurch, and the anti-aircraft guns opened fire on the aircraft of No. 56 Squadron. None of the pilots had yet been in combat, few had seen a German aircraft at close quarters, and most British machines lacked identification friend or foe (IFF) equipment, which was only just being introduced.

Spitfires against Hurricanes

A Flight of No. 74 Squadron was led by the South African Adolph “Sailor” Malan. He spotted aircraft that he took to be hostile and, according to most accounts, gave the order to attack. He later claimed that at the last moment he had called over the radio that they were friendly and that the attack should be broken off. If so, two of his pilots, Flying Officer Vincent “Paddy” Byrne and Pilot Officer John Freeborn, did not hear him. They opened fire on the two Hurricanes flying behind their squadron. Pilot Officer Frank Rose managed to put his damaged aircraft down. Montague Hulton-Harrop, hit in the head, was dead before his Hurricane crashed into a field at Hintlesham, a few kilometres west of Ipswich. He was the first British fighter pilot to be killed in the war, and his aircraft the first to be shot down by a Spitfire. Further losses were reportedly prevented by the commander of No. 151 Squadron, Squadron Leader Edward Donaldson, who recognised the attackers and forbade his pilots to return fire.

Byrne and Freeborn were placed under arrest after landing and were tried by a court martial that sat behind closed doors at Fighter Command headquarters. Malan gave evidence against them, accusing Freeborn of irresponsibility. Freeborn’s counsel, the celebrated barrister Sir Patrick Hastings, called him in reply a barefaced liar. The court acquitted both pilots, ruling the incident an unfortunate accident. The affair was hushed up. In the RAF it was ironically dubbed the “Battle of Barking Creek”: Barking Creek, the mouth of a small river near London, lay several dozen kilometres from where the aircraft were shot down, but it was a stock butt of music-hall jokes, a sort of back of beyond.

The lessons proved far more important than the verdict. The filtering of false radar echoes was improved, as was the work of the operations rooms in which the reports of radar stations and observers were plotted; communications between the ground and the aircraft were put in order, and the fitting of IFF equipment was speeded up. British historians, among them Patrick Bishop, judge that without this lesson Dowding’s system would have worked less well in the summer of 1940.

The sinking of the Oxley

At sea a similar fate befell British submarines. Even before the declaration of war, five boats of the 2nd Submarine Flotilla were sent on patrol off the south-western coast of Norway, where they were to watch for German warships heading out into the Atlantic. Their sectors were laid out along a line passing the Obrestad lighthouse. One of them was HMS Oxley, built in the 1920s for the Australian navy as HMAS Oxley and transferred to the Royal Navy in 1931. The neighbouring sector was patrolled by a new T-class boat, HMS Triton, commanded by Lieutenant Commander H. P. de C. Steel.

At 7.55 p.m. on 10 September the Triton surfaced to charge her batteries. At around 8.45 p.m. the watch sighted the low silhouette of a submarine on the port bow. Steel came up to the bridge and ordered the torpedo tubes to be made ready. The signalman flashed the recognition signal three times by lamp; there was no reply. Steel considered that it might be the Oxley, but she ought to have been in her own sector, some distance away. He ordered three green flares to be fired from the grenade launcher, waited for a quarter of a minute or so and concluded that he was facing a U-boat. He fired two torpedoes. Less than a minute later an explosion was heard.

The Triton closed the spot and in the beam of her searchlight saw three men in the water among the oil and debris. Two of her officers jumped into the sea and pulled out the Oxley’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Harold Bowerman, and Able Seaman Gluckes. The third survivor, Lieutenant F. K. Manley, swam on for a moment and then disappeared beneath the surface. Fifty-three men were killed. The board of inquiry found that the Oxley had strayed out of her sector and that the Triton had acted correctly. Steel was exonerated: he had done everything that could reasonably be expected of him. The Admiralty, headed since 3 September by Winston Churchill, did not disclose the truth. During the war the loss of the Oxley was attributed to an accidental explosion, and after the war to a collision with the Triton. The actual circumstances were made public only in the 1950s.

Place in the war

Both incidents were a foretaste of a problem that accompanied the whole war. The British historian Paul Kemp, author of a book on friendly fire at sea, Friend or Foe, showed that Allied ships and aircraft repeatedly attacked their own units, especially when operating close together in poor visibility. The German side was not immune either: on 22 February 1940 a Luftwaffe bomber attacked German destroyers in the North Sea, which ran onto a minefield as they tried to escape; two sank with more than five hundred sailors.

The participants in the “Battle of Barking Creek” fought on. Malan became one of the RAF’s highest-scoring aces, and in the Battle of Britain Freeborn logged more operational flying hours than any other pilot. Frank Rose was killed in France in May 1940, and Byrne, shot down the same year, was taken prisoner by the Germans. The Triton was lost with all hands in the Adriatic in December 1940. The most important legacy of 6 September, however, proved to be the improved air defence system, which in the summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, allowed the RAF to direct its scarce fighters to where the enemy was really coming in.