Hollis Harry "Holly" Hills

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HILLS, F/O Hollis Henry (J5803) - Mention in Despatches - No.400 Squadron
Award effective 1 January 1943 as per London Gazette of that date and
AFRO 232/43 dated 12 February 1943

During the Battle of Dieppe on 19th August 1942, this officer accompanied his Flight Commander on two low reconnaissances over the approaches to the battle area. During the second of these, they were attacked by three FW.190s. When Flying Officer Hills found he could not warn his Flight Commander, owing to a radio failure, he engaged the three enemy aircraft, shooting down one and driving off the other two, until the Flight Commander became aware of the situation.

NOTE: Unit identified in AFRO as No.400 Squadron. Later transferred to US Navy with which he won an American DFC which is now in the Canadian War Museum (AN 19890038-001). The same museum has a model of a Mustang in the colours of one flown by him. No published citation to award. Directorate of History and Heritage files have recommendedation for MiD compiled by W/C R.F. Begg, Commanding Officer, No.414 Squadron on 23 August 1942.

NOTE: Public Records Office Air 2/8769 has recommendation for a Croix de Guerre from No.414 Squadron, dated 1 February 1943. The wording is identical to the above except that the following is added: "Flying Officer Hills, who is an American, has since transferred to the U.S. Naval Air Arm."

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The following is an excerpt written by Ian Clarke
after several conversations with his father Freddy

Having survived the intensity of the training regimen at Old Sarum, and the imperious eye of the eccentric Campbell-Voullaire, Clarke was finally posted to an active squadron in mid May of 1941. He joined the first organized unit of the RCAF ever to set foot on English soil, No. 110 "City of Toronto" (Army Cooperation) Squadron (Auxiliary)¹. Only two months before 110 had been renumbered No.400 Squadron. Appropriately enough the squadron had first arrived at Campbell-Voullaire's Old Sarum before moving on to Odiham, Hampshire in June of 1940 ². They were still there when Clarke joined "A" Flight under Flight Lieutenant G. H. Elms, but by the time "A" Flight had moved on to fighter tactics training and ops at Middle Wallop in October, he had been sent on to Croydon in the formation of 400's sister squadron, No. 414 ³.
Clarke's first month with 400 Squadron did not go particularly well. Hitting power cables on one low level practice area search, and breaking his tail wheel in a forced landing having lost his way from Gatwick to Odiham on the same day would have done little to endear him to Squadron Leader Campbell-Voullaire. Yet it was back to the Army Cooperation School that Clarke had to return, not to upgrade his skills but to participate in the conversion from Lysanders to the new Curtiss Tomahawks with which 400 Squadron would soon be equipped ⁴. The C.O. performed two flying checks within a week at the end of May. Since the second only lasted a scant five minutes, barely long enough to take off and land downwind, apparently there was nothing wrong with Clarke's flying skills ⁵. Six flights in a Harvard to familiarize himself once again with the characteristics of a single engine, low-wing monoplane included circuits and landings as well as aerobatics. This led to six flights, all under an hour each, in a Tomahawk, the first three practicing circuits and landings and the last three devoted more to the joy of flying his first real high performance fighter aircraft. The elation was short lived. Within hours Clarke was flying back to Odiham in one of 400 Squadron's Lysanders with Jack Amos, a Pilot Officer from North Battleford in the second seat. It would be nearly a month before Clarke was given another turn on a Tomahawk. Meanwhile he began the serious business of learning the skills of a tactical reconnaissance pilot.
As junior members of the squadron the newly attached pilots ferried airmen and soldiers to various airfields in southern England while building up hours in formation flying, dive bombing practice, towing drogues for anti-aircraft units, aerial photography, and the detailed routines of close, contact, and tactical reconnaissance. On July 2 on a practice reconnaissance flight Clarke's radio/telephone (r/t) failed foreshadowing the problems that would plague him the day of the raid on Dieppe. On the fourth a more serious problem occurred in the same aircraft when the throttle stuck open at 1,650 rpm leaving him in the air for three hours trying to ride the aircraft down. Three days later he spent an hour and twenty minutes working with the same problem on the same aircraft ⁶. The rest of July passed almost uneventfully, a considerable amount of time being devoted to the drudgery of towing drogues for ground and air gunnery practice, a task relegated to the junior officers of the squadron. On the 24th, in the company of one of the squadron's administrative officers while touring the coast of Wales at zero feet, Clarke felt the aircraft shudder as one of the heavily cowled main wheels struck a swell. With considerable energy and quickness he pulled the aircraft into a steep climb while Flight Lieutenant Herbertson remained blissfully unaware of the danger to the aircraft and to himself ⁷.
August opened somewhat more auspiciously as Clarke was given a Tomahawk for the day. The exercise went considerably deeper into combat tactics than he had been allowed to go before. In five separate flights he practiced air to ground strafing, air-to-air rear quarter attacks, and air-to-air beam approaches. Later in the month, a new posting gave him even better opportunities to fly the single seat fighters. On August 13th, along with a flight's complement of pilots, ground crew and other support staff received orders to proceed to Croydon where they were to form the new 414 Squadron at Croydon, a move that would alter the entire course of his life. It was from Croydon that he would meet his future wife, and it was with 414 Squadron that he would both participate in the Dieppe raid and eventually lose his best friend, Cliff Horncastle.
Clarke was posted to 414 only two days after its inception. The RCAF's twelfth squadron formed overseas and the second army cooperation squadron, 414 was known as the "Sarnia Imperials." Like its sister squadron, 414 would be re-designated as a fighter reconnaissance squadron in June 1943 ⁸, not long after Clarke had completed his last operational flights in preparation for a new posting to 39 Reconnaissance Wing as Flight Lieutenant, Ops ⁹.
Two Tomahawk "flips" with his new squadron later in the month, one in which he had to contend with an "oil gusher," not an uncommon complaint in the P40s, seemed to bode well for his advancing status as a pilot ¹⁰. It was, at the same time, an indication of the progress being made in converting the two army cooperation squadrons from Lysanders to the more operationally useful and certainly more powerful Tomahawk. By September, Clarke and at least two others from the original group at Lethbridge, Jack Amos and Cliff Horncastle, had achieved full-fledged fighter pilot status with the new squadron. Amid a certain amount of ferrying that needed to be done to bring the squadron up to operation strength with the new aircraft, Clarke added twenty-four hours to his Tomahawk totals with a considerable amount of formation flying. These included squadron formations, formation landings, section formations, and low level practice. Other than managing to bury a propeller on one landing after formation practice, the flying seems to have gone as planned ¹¹.
Having quadrupled his time on Tomahawks in September, Clarke doubled it again in October, adding another 20 hours to his cumulative totals. The first part of October began with great excitement, although the squadron had still not performed its first operational flight of the war. In Tomahawks he participated in a "vic" formation fly-past for the Duke of Kent, and practiced section attacks on armored divisions, low flying aerobatics, low flying formations, and section "vic" formations with landings. It was a new high point for the squadron, but it was short lived. In fact, 414 would not fly its first operational mission until June the next year. This appears to emphasize the dedication of the Canadian army cooperation squadrons to "obtain . . . photographic reconnaissance for Allied invasion planners ¹²." Since no tactical invasion planning occurred in Europe until the summer of 1942, the Tac R squadrons remained, in effect, in a continuous training mode until the planning of the Dieppe raid required their photographic assistance.
What had been rather exciting in October began to prove somewhat routine and potentially somewhat tedious in November. Clarke's hours on the Tomahawk slumped from a previous high of twenty-two to fifteen, and in December to little more than eight. At one point he even resorted to the use of the squadron's Tiger Moth for forty-five minutes of low flying practice ¹³.
The period between October 1941 and August 1942 may have been something of the doldrums for the squadron but it was a high point in Clarke's flying career. Both he and the squadron were introduced to the new North American P-51 1A Mustang, but he was also promoted to the command of "A" Flight, 414 Squadron in January. At the same time, Pilot Officer Hollis ("Holly") Hills, an Californian with the RCAF, joined the squadron at Croydon. Hills would figure prominently in the incidents over Dieppe later in August.
February passed rather laconically. Clarke flew under fifteen hours total as leader of "A" Flight, only fifty minutes of which were devoted to Tomahawks, although he does seem to have staked out some claim to RU G and RU A along with RU F for "Freddy" which he came to rely upon ¹⁴. Nevertheless, in March it was the carburetor heater in RU F which failed on landing after a formation practice that forced him to make a particularly difficult landing approach in a nose-up, stall attitude from which both he and the aircraft survived. A week later he was participating in a formation flight for the benefit of General Bernard Montgomery, a fitting demonstration for the commander of the Commonwealth armies in Europe. Before the month was out, P/O Clarke had been promoted to Flight Lieutenant, a rank more befitting a flight leader.
In April, the idiosyncrasies of the Tomahawk cost the squadron the use of RU A. After another bout of formation flying, F/L Clarke experienced an oil pump failure and proceeded with emergency procedures to make a forced belly landing in a farmer's field near Cliddesden ¹⁵. The aircraft was unserviceable for a considerable length of time but it was repaired and flew again, although F/L Clarke's later experience with RU A was in a Mustang and not the Tomahawk which he had been forced to belly land.
By mid May 1942 it had become clear that the general tenor of squadron training had changed abruptly. This could have been a response to the new offensive strategies being adopted by fighter and bomber command in mid 1942, but for the Canadian army cooperation units it had to mean something more. Devoted as they were to support of invasion planning, it is obvious in retrospect that the pressure to open another front against the Germans in Europe, and the desire to use a major foray against the fortified French coast as a fact gathering experiment, was about to bring the reconnaissance squadrons into action over France. Of twenty two flights that month nineteen were made in Tomahawks. Many of these dealt with tactical reconnaissance in poor weather and "weather tests" with low flying practice. Formation flying with cover in sets of two presaged the squadron's precise role over Dieppe on the morning of August 19th ¹⁶.
For F/L Clarke in particular, and for the squadron in general, June signaled a quantum change in training. Although many were of shorter than usual duration, he flew fifty-six times, far more than any previous month during this extended training period. An intensive series of air to air tactics consumed most of his time on Tomahawks for June. Then, at mid month,the first Mustangs arrived at Croydon most of which appear to have been from the AG series and among the first 100 or 110 to have been produced. After two weeks of familiarization exercises, F/L Clarke and two others in "A" flight participated in 414 squadron's first operational sortie, a "dusk patrol" along the coast in which no raiders were seen ¹⁷ .
The Mustang was a successor to the Tomahawk that had been identified as such even as the Purchasing Commission was ordering the RAF versions of the Curtiss Hawk. Unlike the supercharged Merlin engine versions of the Mustang 1B, the 1A was not as effective at altitude, but in a low level tactical reconnaissance role, these disadvantages would be largely nullified. Some pilots complained of the large and obtrusive gun site and its brutal plate of armored glass. Even with the same effective power plant as the Tomahawk, the Mustang's superior design made it 50 knots faster. It was a crucial advantage over the Tomahawk that the Mustang would take into combat over Dieppe against Germany's superior fighter, the Focke-Wulf 190 ¹⁸. It was made doubly critical in view of the preponderance of FW 190 in the aerial combat, as if the Me 109F barely existed.
On July 30, less than three weeks before the raid F/L Clarke took Mustang AM167 up for a practice flight but shortly into the flight the radio burned out and he had to abort. This tendency if it was such, would cost Clarke dearly on the 19th. Like July, August continued with relatively light flying duties. On the 6th he flew a practice "contact recce", a system which was intended to provide direct tactical support to ground troops. Then, at night, during the evening of the 18th, Clarke and his squadron flew to Gatwick in preparation for the Dieppe Invasion ¹⁹.
The squadron had a limited, singular task to perform as outlined in the battle plan. The rumor of the presence of an armored division on leave from the eastern front and stationed in Amiens south of Dieppe, dictated that 414 would fly set patterns on the routes between Dieppe and Amiens. Early in the morning of the 19th of August, before sunrise, flying Mustang AG 655, Clarke took off as leader of "A" flight with P/O Hills flying cover. They were the first up of any of the four Mustang squadrons, two RAF and two Canadian. With Hills weaving above and behind, Clarke was to perform a road reconnaissance and to report on the movement of any armour toward the beech. Hills was to protect him as he concentrated on this task. Searchlights at the coastal installations allowed Hills to see the other Mustang quite readily; but once they had crossed the French coast just south west of the town of Dieppe, Hills could see nothing on the ground or in the sky, including his leader. Trying to finish the mission alone he was unable to see any of the mapped roads, nor did he see any sign of the armour. Hills "returned to Gatwick, alone and with no damage." ²⁰
Meanwhile F/L Clarke was having much the same experience. Without cover he proceeded as best he could to track the road to Amiens that would run in behind Dieppe in a southerly direction. Dieppe, at least, was marked by a considerable amount of fire and the searchlights of the artillery positions searching for the Boston medium bombers that had been sent against them. As twilight bloomed on the northeastern horizon, having seen nothing of the armored division, the lone Mustang turned back toward England on a course that would take him over an anti-aircraft position. Flying at zero feet F/L Clarke fired a short strafing burst at the emplacement without enough time to record his hits, if any, and proceeded out over the channel. In the distance, coming off the English coast he spotted a spec that rapidly grew into a German FW 190. Both aircraft streaked past one another without firing a shot and F/L Clarke continued on to Gatwick in the belief that they were both simply glad to be making it back in one piece ²¹. He would not receive so happy a reception on his next sortie later that morning.
Originally scheduled for only one sortie over Dieppe, Clarke and Hills accepted responsibility for another in the mid morning during a particularly chaotic moment in the squadron. Without the cover of night, it was particularly important that the relationship between the observer and his cover be maintained at all points during the mission. Observing radio silence according to the standing orders, they had no way of knowing that F/L Clarke's Radio/Telephone had failed him once again. As they crossed the channel, it became readily apparent that they had become part of the greatest air battle yet fought over Europe ²². As they neared the coast west of Dieppe Hills spotted a flight of four FW 190s to the right at 1,500 feet, on a course that would take them directly overhead the two Mustangs as they crossed the beach. Hills broke silence and called twice, the second time after F/L Clarke had turned left toward the Amiens road but directly under the Germans, giving the ideal attack advantage.
Realizing that he would have to take extraordinary action, P/O Hills swung wide to his leader's left:

"This put me right over town dusting the chimney tops. I believe the 190s had lost sight of me as I had stayed under them. My plan was to cut off the lead FW before he could open fire on Freddy. My timing all went to pot when a crashing Spitfire forced me into a sharp left turn to avoid a collision. That gave the FW pilot time to get to firing position and he hit Freddy's Mustang with his first burst. . . . Glycol was streaming from the radiator but there was no fire. I was able to get a long shot at the leader but had to break hard right as the number two man was having a go at me. He missed and made a big mistake sliding by my left side. It was an easy shot and I hit him hard. . . . I knew that he was a goner. . . " ²³

F/L Clarke was oblivious to the action that was unfolding above his head until the first shells slammed into the oil cooler of his aircraft's Allison engine:

"The next thing I know is there is `all Hell and corruption' going by. . . . I'd been hit. . . . The radiator was shot up, my instruments on either side of me were gone. The armour plating saved me. So I jettisoned the hood hoping that it hadn't been jammed with the shots, and it wasn't. And I thought, `They're right, it's nice--not windy in here at all.'. . ."

Instinctively he had twisted his aircraft into a hard climbing right hand turn: "I got about 800 feet. That's all she'd get." Without his radiator he knew that it was only a matter of time before the engine seized completely. Although the pilots had been offered the inland race track as a potential crash landing site, he had no intentions of risking capture, and preferred instead to take his chances in the channel. He would never have made it had it not been for the timely return of Hills to the scene of his leaders's obvious distress. Assuming the FW now tailing the stricken Mustang was hoping for the capture of an intact Mustang, Hills saw him begin to slide in behind for the kill to stop Clarke short of the channel. "I had to try to stop him so I gave a short high deflection burst at him. I was hoping to get his attention and it worked. He broke hard left into my attack." ²⁴
As P/O Hills attempted to mix it with the German, proving that the Mustang could at least out turn the Focke-Wulf, Clarke continued in his struggle to reach the water. It was a perilous moment, considering that no one had been known to "ditch" a Mustang and survive, principally because of the large air scoop under the belly hat acted as a rather unfortunate rudder, directing the nose of the aircraft immediately toward the bottom. This did not happen in Clarke's case. Unfortunately it is still unknown as to exactly what did happen in the last seconds of the crash landing. F/L Clarke's memory has survived only to include the moment above the water at 10 feet, an airspeed indicator reading 90 knots, and the moment when he woke up in the bottom of a landing craft:

"I limped out to the water. Just as I crossed the coast that prop . . . seized as solid as a . . . . There I am down wind, across the trough. . . . Everything's ag'in ya. Using my trim to keep my tail down, the last thing I remember is about 90 miles an hour on the clock, trying to get that tail down. I wanted the tail to hit first to kill the speed before she flopped in, because it would just go in if you hit the air scoop. The next thing I remember I came to in a landing craft. . . . I hit the gun site I think. The perspex was coming out of [my forehead] until ten or fifteen years ago. They say a young army guy hit the water with his arms going and got me out of the aircraft. I would give anything to have known who he was."

With the other wounded F/L Clarke was transferred to the Destroyer HMS Calpe which was itself under extremely heavy attack for most the late morning and early afternoon while they tried to retrieve those whom they could. After being treated for the wound to his head he finally returned to Purley where he and Holly were billeted in a requisitioned house:

"About five the next morning, my door burst open. I was grabbed in a bear hug by what smelled like a huge clump of seaweed. It was Freddie Clarke, rescued by the Amphibious forces as I had [told the squadron]. . . on my return from the mission. His head sported a huge bandage covering the severe cuts he had received in the ditching. We had been warned that ditching a Mustang could be hazardous to your health." ²⁵

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1. The Historical Section of the Royal Canadian Air Force, The R.C.A.F. Overseas: the First Four Years, (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 6.
2. Kostenuk and Griffin, RCAF, p. 80.
3. See: Frederick E. Clarke, "Royal Canadian Air Force Pilot's Flying Log Book," R.C.A.F. Form R-95, entries for August 24, 1941 ff.
4. The Tomahawk was a close cousin of Curtiss's more famous Kittyhawk, the P40 made famous by General Charles Chennault's "Flying Tigers" in China. It was a relatively powerful single seat fighter, fitted with an oil cooled, in-line, Allison engine, capable of 370 knots. Like the North American P-51 Mustang 1A that followed it, the Tomahawk was developed especially for the Royal Air Force, to RAF specifications. It became a particular favorite of pilots like Fred Clarke who were more than six feet tall, primarily because of its extraordinarily spacious cockpit. The British Purchasing Commission had seen the Tomahawk's prototype, the Curtiss P40 Hawk and orders for the RAF version began in 1940 bringing 1740 aircraft across to Britain despite the American neutrality embargo. The Tomahawk's Allison was particularly suited to low-level tactical reconnaissance and attack, but the engine was not supercharged and did not function well at altitude. This problem plagued the P-51 Mustang 1A with a similar Allison, but the streamlined design of the Mustang made it a superior aircraft even for low-level work by minimizing the loss of efficiency due to drag. See: William Newby Grant, "P-51 Mustang," in Classic Aircraft of World War II, (Greenwich, Ct.: Bison Books, 1981), pp. 272-73.
5. See in particular: F. E. Clarke, Log Book, for May 19, 25 and 31, 1941.
6. See in particular: F. E. Clarke, Log Book, for July 4 and 7, 1941.
7. Ibid, July 24, 1941.
8. Kostenuk and Griffin, R.C.A.F., pp. 80 and 104.
9. See: F. E. Clarke, Log Book, for May and July, 1943.
10. See: F. E. Clarke, Log Book, for August 26 and 27, 1941.
11. Ibid., August 1941. The note about "put[ting] the prop in] on landing occurs on September 19.
12. Kostenuk and Griffin, R.C.A.F., p. 104.
13. See: F. E. Clarke, Log Book, for November and December, 1941. The reference to the Tiger Moth appears on December 12th. On Boxing Day he carried out more low flying practice in a Miles Magister, but finished off the month with two and a half hours of low flying, fighter tactics, formation and cloud flying as well as R/T work in a Tomahawk.
"I remember the first time I tried to fly a Tiger Moth in England after I had been flying the fighters, and I couldn't get it back down on the ground. I couldn't fly it slowly enough to land it at first. I floated clear across Croydon aerodrome--had to go around and readjust my sights and come back in." Interview with F. E. Clarke, February 20, 1991.
14. The two army cooperation squadrons had only been assigned squadron identification numbers in October of 1941. No. 400 Squadron used the SP series while 414 was assigned RU.
15. F. E. Clarke, Pilot's Log, April 14, 1942. Fred Clarke recounts the story that when his oil pressure disappeared he waved of his wing man, Stuart "Chappy" Chapman, who simply continued to follow him down assuming that they were continuing with low level formation practice. Only when he saw the propeller of RU A's propeller quit and begin to scrape through the earth did he realize that practice was over. Clarke meanwhile clambered out of his aircraft to be greeted by a little boy who came running across the field to ask, "Is it true that you've had an engine failure, and had to do a forced landing in this field?" "Oh yes," came the response through paroxysms of laughter.
16. Ibid, May 1 to May 30, 1942.
17. See Kostenuk and Griffin, R.C.A.F., p. 104; and F. E. Clarke, "Log Book," June 30, 1942.
18. The allied air forces became intimately familiar with the capabilities of the FW 190 when a Luftwaffe pilot mistakenly landed at the RAF aerodrome at Pembrey. It confirmed their worst fears. On the 9th of August the report issued by the RAF on the captured aircraft emphasized its "exceptional flying characteristics," the superlative search view from its well protected cockpit, and its outstanding aileron controls. It surpassed the Spitfire V in every respect, . . . only the new Spitfire IX really compared favorably. As cited in: John P. Campbell, "Air Operations and the Dieppe Raid," Aerospace Historian, (Spring, March 1976), p. 10.
19. F. E. Clarke, "Log Book," July and August, 1942. See in particular the entries for July 30 and for August 6.
20. Hollis F. Hills, "Mustangs at Dieppe," unpublished manuscript, (np, nd), p. 1.
21. Interview with F. E. Clarke, March , 1991.
22. "Starting at sea level and going all the way up to contrail level, the sky was full of Fighters in one massive dogfight. I was busy but in hurried glances counted eleven parachutes at one time." Hollis F. Hills, "Mustangs at Dieppe," p. 2.
23. Hollis F. Hills, "Mustangs at Dieppe," p. 3.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 4.

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Plenty of Excitement (over Dieppe)

Ottawa feb 8 - ... One of the squadrons, that commanded by Wing-Cmdr. Begg, had more than its share of excitement. Flight-Lieut. Fred Clarke, of Calgary and the Barbadoes, was attacked by a Fock-Wulf 190 and shot down into the sea. His pal, P.O. Holly Hills, an American now a member of the United States Navy, attacked the Focke-Wulf and shot it down in flames, the squadron's first and only victim to date, Clarke later was picked up by a naval craft unhurt.
F.O. Charles (Smokey) Stover, of Sarnia. Ont., was flying at about 50 feet when forced to take evasive action from a Focke-Wulf 190. He dived down too low and his wing hit a telephone pole. Although three feet of his wing tip was sliced off and half his aileron gone, Stover brought his machine safely back to base.
Since then Stover has been married to the daughter of a former pilot of British Imperial Airways.
Sgdn-Ldr. Frank Greenwood, of Beloeil, Que., second-in-command of his squadron, who also has been married since he left Canada, recently became a father. He holds the record of having landed the first aircraft on the present station, setting down a Tiger Moth-when the runways were only partly completed.

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Victories Include :

Score  =  5 / 0 / 1  +  3 destroyed On The Ground

* Over Dieppe - Considered the 1st ever Mustang kill (with Mustang 1 - AG470  RU-M)

Zeke = Mitsubishi A6M Zero
Sally = Mitsubishi Ki-21

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