For many of us the New Zealander who is probably most readily associated with the Battle of Britain, which raged in the skies over Great Britain and the English Channel through July-October 1940, is Sir Keith Park. Sir Keith commanded Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command No.11 Group which was responsible for the air defence of southern England, including London. He was famously acknowledged after the war by then-head of the RAF Lord Tedder who said of him, ‘If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did. I don’t believe it is realized how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgment and his skill, did to save not only this country, but the world’.

In his speech at the New Zealand Society annual dinner in February 1947, Lord Tedder regretted that he had never visited New Zealand but said ‘he had met a lot of New Zealanders whenever there had been any disturbance in the world, for then, he said “you usually find some New Zealanders in the middle of the pack and pretty well occupied.”’^[i]During the Battle of Britain there were indeed many other New Zealanders contributing in important ways, ‘being New Zealanders’ both on the ground and in the air. By the end of July 1940 New Zealand’s Minister of Defence Fred Jones was noting 710 New Zealand pilots were in the RAF^[ii] 135 New Zealanders flew with Fighter Command during the furious four months.^[iii]

And New Zealanders displayed plenty of character. While he lost his life in France before the Battle of Britain began, one of New Zealand’s early aces Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain was celebrated as much for his warmth and charisma as for his exploits.^[iv] Others had remarkable and diverse experiences including fellow ace Alan Deere who, bailing out over the Kentish countryside in August 1940, landed in a fully laden plum tree incurring the farmer’s displeasure.^[v] But it was all in a day’s work. In mid-August, an unnamed New Zealand Wing-Commander almost casually shot down a lone Heinkel bomber after it was sighted near his air station in England’s north-west. He was apparently enjoying time in the mess when he heard the sighting. ‘He dashed to the tarmac, shot up in his Spitfire and destroyed the German in four minutes.’ The Heinkel crashed without casualties and the bemused pilot commented that he hadn’t even seen what hit him.^[vi]

Whangarei pilot and Battle of Britain airman Derek Ward often flew with his black Scottish Terrier Whisky on his knee, and he designed his own coat-of arms for the side of his Hurricane fighter. The shield displays four images of ‘bad luck’: a broken mirror, three on a match, the number ‘13’ and someone about to walk under a ladder. Below it a banner proclaimed the motto, ‘SO WHAT THE HELL’.^[vii] Clearly he was a bit of a joker with a ‘live and be damned’ philosophy but facing superstition head-on seemed to be a lucky approach for him. Sadly, Ward had some bad luck before the Battle of Britain began when Whisky was accidentally lost in France when Ward flew his damaged plane back to England and thought it unsafe and unfair to bring the dog on the aircraft. Although Whisky was to follow on a passenger plane, he didn’t make it and there seems to be no indication Whisky was ever found. But Ward’s luck rebounded when he had a second ‘adventure’ shortly after, although in this instance ‘luck’ could perhaps be qualified. He survived being shot down over the continent, finding his way back to England over nearly two weeks disguised as a Belgian refugee, only to find his affairs already wound up, with his bank account closed and his car sold. 

While there seems to be little information that directly references Ward’s Battle of Britain experience, he also was an ace, a skilled and valued fighter pilot. He was promoted to Flight-Lieutenant commanding 87 Squadron’s 'B' Flight from 11 August 1940, and the citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), gazetted on 17 October 1941, states, ‘Since September, 1940, he has commanded a flight engaged in night flying operations and has performed excellent work, particularly in the training of new pilots.’^[viii]

The experienced pilots faced mission pressures quite apart from the physical danger of combat. In an interview years later, Alan Deere described the personnel stress of those months. ‘We were desperately short of pilots … We were getting pilots who … came straight to a squadron from their training establishments. Some of them did have a few hours on the Hurricanes, a monoplane experience, but not on the Spitfire. For example, we got two young New Zealanders into my flight. Chatting to them I found they'd been six weeks at sea coming over. They were trained on some very outdated aircraft, I can't remember, out in NZ. They were given I think two trips or something in a Hurricane, something of that sort of order and they arrived at the squadron. We were pretty busy and so we gave them what was known as a cockpit check. We had by that time a monoplane and we’d give them one trip in that. One of the pilots would take them up to see the handling and brief them on the Spitfire. Then they'd go off for one solo flight and circuit, and then they were into battle. The answer is of course that they didn't last. Those two lasted two trips and they both finished up in Dover Hospital, strangely enough. One was pulled out of the Channel. One landed by parachute.’

The role of wartime fighter pilot drew the enthusiastic and the colourful who nevertheless also needed cool heads under pressure, focus and quick responses and these characteristics were much on display during the Battle of Britain. They were personality traits that helped them to cope with the stress of a mission. In his final words at the 1947 dinner, Lord Tedder turned to the ‘“new generation.” Speaking quietly to the hushed audience, he remarked, ‘‘We old boys may curse them like anything sometimes. But they are damn good. With all respect to us, we old boys, I think they are better than we were.”’^[ix] New Zealand airmen were up there with the best.

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