Probably the third attempt to parachute Philip Schneidau: F/O Jack Oettle makes his debut in 419 Flight as Whitley P5029’s skipper. F/Lt Farley is his Second Pilot, with Sergeants Bernard and Davis as Wireless Operator & Air Gunner, and S/Ldr Ross Shore as Despatcher. Other crew remain unidentified.
S/Ldr Knowles, now a ‘Whitehall warrior’, borrows one of No. 56 Squadron’s Hurricanes. He flies to Ringway in L1764, taking off at 1200. The flight lasts about an hour. He returns between 1805 and 1905. There are obviously enough spare fighters for him to borrow an operational fighter aircraft from a front-line station during the battle.
There’s a gap in the Ringway ORB between the 17th and 22nd. It appears that bad weather prevents any parachute training drops over Tatton Park.
On 30 September Knowles’s borrowed Hurricane will be crash-landed on Chesil beach by P/O M.H. Constable-Maxwell, after 56 Squadron intercepts a raid by He111s on the Westland factory at Yeovil.
Pilot Officer Louis Strange, DSO, MC, DFC* takes command of the Parachute Training School at Ringway, as Acting Squadron Leader.
Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, calls a meeting in which he requires a centralised control of all the clandestine operations.
A French motor torpedo-boat (MTB) returns at night to a beach near Brest and picks up an unidentified agent it had landed on 20th June.
Squadron Leader E.V. Knowles flies his last operational patrol as CO of No. 56 Squadron, this one over Manston. To his contemporaries he is ‘Teddy’ Knowles, but his young pilots like Geoffrey Page have nicknamed him ‘Führer’. Knowles has commanded 56 Squadron since September 1939, and is due to be posted.
P/O Louis Strange flies to Hendon to visit the Air Ministry, to find out what he is supposed to be doing at Ringway. F/Lt O’Neill has already had a go, and returned to Ringway with no answer.
Late in the afternoon S/Ldr Knowles leads half his squadron, a mixed bag from ‘A’ & ‘B’ Flights, on a patrol with 12 Spitfires from No. 610 Squadron. They are to patrol between Gravelines and Furnes (now called Veurne). At about 7 p.m. (other sources say 6.45), in the skies above Dunkirk they see ten Me110s at about their height, 20,000 feet. They attack immediately.
Knowles attacks one Me110 from beneath and almost directly behind, in the blind area for the Me110’s gunner. He gives it a five-second burst from 200 yards: ‘He burst into flames and went down in a steep spiral.’ He doesn’t see the Me110 hit the ground but has no doubt that it did.
Knowles finds another Me110 and attacks it in the same way, giving this one a 7-to-8-second burst from 250 yards. Flames and smoke appear from underneath, and it starts to go down. Knowles doesn’t see this one go down at all, for he sees a Spitfire coming directly at him. He turns away suddenly, but has no doubt about this Me110’s fate.
Knowles’s report indicates that there have been a total of between 40 and 50 enemy aircraft in the area, including others much higher. 610 Squadron’s log indicates that a solitary Heinkel was the initial object of the attack, but Knowles does not mention it in his report. This has been 610 Squadron’s first major encounter with the Luftwaffe, so the more experienced 56 Squadron Hurricanes may have been along to provide a bit of leavening.
In his report Knowles notes one Hurricane and its pilot missing: this was F/O ‘Fish’ Fisher, who turns up at Margate hospital.