It was chance that led to Peter Ayerst becoming the first RAF pilot to take on Messerschmitt 109s during the Second World War. Not just one plane, but 27 of them.
“I was on aerodrome defence near Rouvres, in France, on November 6th, 1939,” he said at his home in Beckenham. “We pilots thought this was a big waste of time. One of us would sit in the aircraft all strapped in. French soldiers in a ditch at the edge of the airfield would scan the sky with powerful binoculars. If they saw an aircraft approaching, and it looked like a German, they would wave a big red flag.
“Suddenly I noticed the flag flying and took off in the Hurricane. I saw this chap at about 2,500 feet. It was a nice day with a clear blue sky, so I decided to chase him.”
It turned out to be a Dornier bomber on a reconnaissance mission, but Peter didn’t know that at the time.
“I was within about two miles of him, but he eventually decided to go down and disappeared into some cloud. I thought: ‘Oh well, that’s that,’ and decided to head for home.
“On that particular day we were expecting another squadron to come and join us. So, when I saw nine aircraft coming up below me, I thought: ‘Ah, here come the chaps. I haven’t been airborne very long I might as well join them.
“They were flying single file. It wasn’t until I saw them close-up that I noticed they had bloody great black crosses on them. I had never seen a 109 before. I had a quick squirt at the tail ender and then went flat out in a westerly direction. That was officially the first aerial encounter of the War.
“As they had now identified me, they decided to chase me. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that there was another19 109’s behind me. So that would have been 27 against one, which I didn’t consider to be very fair odds.
“But by good fortune, and also by chance, I led them through a French fighter patrol, and the French chaps went for them, and shot nine of them down.
“By now I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was. I knew I was over France, because the glass factory roofs had been painted blue, and I knew the French did that. I throttled back to conserve fuel and lost height. I could see some aircraft circling round in the distance and sure enough, below them was a grass airfield.
“I landed and was taxiing away from the landing area when my engine stopped. I was out of fuel and only just made it. I stayed overnight at this airfield, which happened to be at Nancy, and next day refuelled and returned to Rouvres.
“When I got back my senior engineer told me: ‘You know you should never have flown that plane back.’ When I asked why he said: ‘You’ve got quite a few bullet holes in the tail plane, it could have damaged the control column.’
“I didn’t know. Ignorance is bliss.”
By the end of May the following year, it was time to get out of France. Dunkirk was out of the question for Peter, and he made his way to the Brittany ports, escaping on a ship that travelled at night to avoid the bombers.
After a short period of leave he was sent as an instructor to one of the newly formed Operational Training Units. The Battle of Britain was coming and Britain badly needed pilots who could take on the Luftwaffe. Instructors with operational experience were vital to winning the air war.
It meant Peter had to undergo training himself, to become familiar with the Spitfire, which was faster than the Hurricane and more difficult to fly. It was not essentially an operational role. But you can’t keep a good fighter pilot down, and he did take off on August 7th, 1940, to bring down a Heinkel bomber. “The pilot made quite a good wheels-up landing in a big field,” he said.
The crew of the Heinkel were taken as prisoners of war to Canada. After peace was declared, Peter became close friends with one of them. In the meantime, there was a war to fight, and he had work to do in North Africa, and on the home front during the D-Day campaign.
