Last of the Few

LEN DAVIES, a bright grammar school lad who was keen to fly, met up with a gang of other young teenage aviators at an RAF summer camp in Thornaby. It was August 1939.

Days later, on September 3, the Second World War broke out. Within 12 months, Mr Davies was shot out of the sky, managing to land his plane with a bullet through his leg. He was older by then, only 19.

Mr Davies, a Stockton man from a modest background, first a sergeant, then a flight lieutenant, remembers a few of those young lads from that happy training camp. There were a couple from Middlesbrough, one from Darlington, two or three from Stockton, a few from Hartlepool. They didn’t all become pilots. They all served; some died.

A good number of Mr Davies’ comrades died in the Battle of Britain, the 1940 battle for supremacy of the skies. The Nazis wanted to destroy enough of the RAF so they could bomb our superior Royal Navy with virtual impunity before a planned invasion of the country.

Churchill named our fighter pilots The Few.

The Few included some of Len’s best friends.

Bill Peacock, another hero born by the River Tees, was one of them. “Last I heard he was chasing a plane over the Channel and was never seen again,” said Mr Davies. “Very sad.”

Yet another was Brian Kirk, of Northallerton.

“I went down to London with him on the train. He was a bit older than me and I was very close to him. We got out, had a cup of tea at a Lyons cafe and I went to join one squadron and he another.”

Soon after, Mr Kirk was shot down. He died of his injuries after several months of agony.

Mr Davies, known to many in Stockton as Mick, who these days lives near his daughter in Cardiff, pays them simple tribute: “They were decent, intelligent young men that were lost – the cream of a generation.”

RESPECTED RAF historian Robert Dixon is due to publish his third book on the RAF, titled Men of the North, A Few of the Few.

Mr Dixon, of Northumberland, who has dedicated years to preserving the memory of our flying heroes on his website, norav.50megs.c om, said there is one other Battle of Britain fighter pilot, Stuart Nigel Rose, originally from Elswick, Newcastle, but now living in Kent, who is still alive but who cannot be contacted.

We lost another hero, George Palliser, of Hartlepool, only weeks ago.

That leaves Len Davies, born in Norton, but who grew up in Newtown, Stockton, the youngest of eight, his family reading The Northern Echo every day; an ordinary lad.

An astonishingly humble man, he talks about the time he was shot from the sky as a teenager.

Badly damaged: The wreckage of Len Davies' plane after its crash

He was wounded and weakening, but somehow spotted an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, itself bombed and full of craters, and managed to land.

He said: “It was over the Thames. I’d been hit and took something in the leg. Had to get it down somehow. We were being bombed all round, but I landed it on the runway, only to go straight into a crater and it turned me over.”

Mr Davies said that, despite the Luftwaffe’s superior numbers, Britain fighting alone, and an appalling casualty rate – at one point a recruit’s chances of surviving his first five sorties were zero – he and his comrades had little doubt they would win. Mr Davies said: “Nobody thought we would lose. Malta, when I fought there, was different. You would be stalked in the sky day after day. It was depressing.

That was the only time I felt some of our chaps were nervy; not the Battle of Britain.”

It was a tough, tragic war, but Mr Davies, like many, was not inclined to tell the world about his heroism after 1945. He did not even bother to join the RAF or Battle of Britain associations.

In fact, despite having the strongest possible pride in the men he served with, Mr Davies did not have a great affection for the RAF after the war.

“I found them to be a snooty lot,” he said.

“There was no snobbery among the people when it came time to take off, but the sergeants and officers were often in two different worlds for much of the rest of the time.

“When I was commissioned as an officer in, I think, 1942, I remember I walked across the airfield to the officers’ side. I remember seeing how good it was and thinking, ‘what the hell have I been doing?’ There I’d been digging my own tent and sandbags and here I was being presented with an Italian POW as a bat man, attending to my every need.”

AFTER the war, Mr Davies went to Durham University to study engineering and met a girl on his first day.

He hardly spent another day apart from the woman who became his wife, former Wren, Katie, until she died nearly two years ago. The couple had two children, with Mr Davies working in a number of jobs including as chief engineer in an aluminium works in Swansea.

In the Fifties and Sixties, Hollywood films depicted The Few, often stressing the glamour of the handsome, brave young heroes.

“I watched them,” said Mr Davies. “Watched while criticising them all in my own mind. At one point we were losing two or three people every single day. A lot of them, like my pal Bill Peacock, never saw what hit them. No chance, no daring battle. That was the truth.”

Mr Dixon speaks passionately about the need for these men to be remembered. “If you asked anybody in the street, put any of these names to them, they’d never have heard of them.

There’s no monument in the North of England.

Many of their names are not mentioned on our war memorials “They should all be remembered, all commemorated, these incredible, brave men.”

􀁧 Mr Davies will be commemorated along with fellow fighter pilot William Ernest Gore, who died in the Battle of Britain aged 25, with a plaque to be unveiled at Ian Ramsey School, in Stockton, on November 18.

Anyone with information about Mr Gore’s descendants is asked to call Chris Webber on 01325-505079.