In the late 1970s, I was fortunate enough to spend some one-on-one time with Royal Air Force Battle of Britain hero Robert Stanford Tuck. I had worn out the pages of his biography, Fly For Your Life, and was awed by the chance to have a face-to-face conversation about flying Spitfires and Hurricanes while engaging the Luftwaffe over the British homeland and the English Channel.
I asked Tuck how it felt while climbing to intercept the bomber formations and watching out for their escorting Messerschmitts. His words came out in short bursts, like the machine gun fire from the eight Brownings in the wings of his Spitfire.
One thing he shared has stuck with me all these years. “It was a bit eerie, really,” he said. “You could hear them over the RT [radio telephone] warning each other in clipped, nervous voices, ‘Achtung! Schpitfeuer!’”
Air-to-air radio communications were still a fresh technology in 1940. Imagine being able to eavesdrop on your kill-or-be-killed enemy in the heat of combat! Most of the World War II fighter pilots I’ve met and read about would say they thought of aerial battle as plane-vs-plane, rather than a personal combat between human adversaries. So, the idea that they could actually listen to enemy pilots talking amongst themselves has always struck me as one of the stranger human experiences of the air war in 1940.
