With Wings Like Eagles (2 page)

This was nothing more than common sense. It would be hard enough to transport 250,000 German troops (and more than 50,000 horses, for the German army’s artillery was still largely horse-drawn), as well as quantities of field artillery and tanks—and this would constitute merely the first wave of the invasion—across the Channel in flat-bottomed river barges towed by tugboats, without their being constantly strafed by Fighter Command and bombed by Bomber Command on the way over. More important, the
Luftwaffe
could hardly concentrate on the vital task of sinking British cruisers and destroyers attacking the invasion fleet in the narrow waters of the Channel if the skies were full of RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes. When it came to Sea Lion, the German armed forces were involved in an “After you, Alphonse” situation. The army was ready to go as soon as the navy was prepared; the navy would go the minute the
Luftwaffe
had destroyed the RAF; and it was therefore left to the
Luftwaffe
to make the first move.

In normal circumstances, any air force might have hesitated before accepting this responsibility, but Germany was not a normal place. The
Luftwaffe
was commanded by Hermann Göring, then still regarded as the second most important man in the Reich and as Hitler’s closest collaborator. In addition to the fact that Göring ran the
Luftwaffe
as a personal fiefdom, it was also the youngest and the most authentically Nazi of the three armed forces. The navy and the army had traditions that went back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many of their senior officers regarded the Führer as an up-start and the Nazi Party as a collection of social misfits, clowns, and sinister thugs, but the
Luftwaffe
had been created by the Nazis in 1933—secretly, because at the time the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to have an air force. The
Luftwaffe
owed its existence to Hitler, and as a young man’s service it represented his modernistic and futuristic ambitions. Like the autobahns; the Volkswagen; the streamlined record-breaking silver race cars from Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union; the huge, spectacular Nuremberg rallies and the Berlin Olympic Games; and the sleek zeppelins carrying passengers across the Atlantic to Brazil and New York, the
Luftwaffe
was intended to show the world that Nazi Germany was the unstoppable power of the future.

Because Göring was its founder and commander in chief, the
Luftwaffe
never suffered from the kind of cheeseparing economies that the British Treasury inflicted on the RAF. What Göring wanted, he got, and that was that, much to the displeasure of the army and navy. Nobody would deny Göring’s energy, intelligence, courage, or ruthlessness, but the
Luftwaffe
also suffered from the flaws in his ample character. First of all, his view of air warfare was ineradicably fixed by his experience in the 1914–1918 war as one of Germany’s leading air aces and winner of its highest and most coveted decoration for valor, Pour le Mérite, known as the “Blue Max.” Second, despite his expansive powers he was abjectly subservient to the Führer. Third, self-indulgence on a grand scale and prodigious vanity were beginning to destroy a character that in any case had always been more receptive to flattery and adulation than to reasoned argument—he was Hitler’s yes-man and wanted his own yes-men around him. Fourth, he collected high offices as avidly as he collected the awards and decorations that made him resemble, in full uniform, a stout, walking Christmas tree. He was not only commander in chief of the
Luftwaffe
but also Hitler’s appointed successor; head of the German four-year plan, with wide-ranging powers over Germany’s economy and industry; aviation minister; founder of the Gestapo; the smiling, cheerful face of Nazism to the outside world, which tended to contrast his girth and luxurious tastes with the abstemious habits of the Führer; and
Jagdmeister
of the Reich—that is, he controlled all hunting and was in charge of what we would now call game and forest conservation. The list of his offices goes on and on—no one person, even someone who was deskbound day and night, could have discharged all of Göring’s duties; and unlike his rival SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, whose
Sitzfleisch
even his numerous enemies did not deny, Göring did not have a deskbound nature. He was Germany’s biggest and most aggressive collector of art; he built on a huge and ambitious scale; his lifestyle bore a resemblance to that of the more flamboyantly corrupt later Roman emperors; and he intruded shamelessly and sometimes brutally into the realm of every other minister of the Reich. Under the circumstances, his attention was not necessarily fixed on the
Luftwaffe
twenty-four hours a day. To be sure, Göring delegated much of his workload, but he was not, as it happened, a particularly gifted delegator, and tended to favor people who agreed with him (or at least said they did), and old flying comrades from World War I. He could be autocratic in his own bluff, outspoken way—when it was pointed out to him that General Erhard Milch, whom he had plucked from Lufthansa to play a leading role in the creation of the
Luftwaffe
, was half Jewish, Göring replied angrily, “In Germany, it is
I
who will decide who is a Jew and who is not!”
*
³
—but his patience and his attention span were fatally limited.

He was also boastful. When the British Expeditionary Force retreated to Dunkirk, he had assured Hitler that there was no need for the army to attack them there—the
Luftwaffe
would strafe them on the beaches and sink any ships that were sent to take the troops home to Britain. He had been unable to deliver on this promise—the British, using 1,000 ships of all kinds, from yachts and pleasure steamers to destroyers, managed to take more than 300,000 men off the beaches and out of the besieged port of Dunkirk, and in the air battles above Dunkirk the Germans for the first time found themselves confronted with the metropolitan squadrons of Fighter Command (as opposed to the relatively small number of British Hurricanes that had been stationed as part of the RAF Advance Air Striking Force in France, and were flown from makeshift fields without the benefit of a sophisticated fighter control system on the ground), and they were taken aback by the quality and the number of British fighter planes. Admittedly, there were mistakes, surprises, and disappointments on both sides, but the
Luftwaffe
could hardly claim a victory.

As a result, however, Göring was all the more determined to show that his beloved
Luftwaffe
could, by itself, bring the British to their knees. This was no small task, as a glance at the map should have told him. Before they could even begin it, the Germans would have to move two
Luftflotten
(“air fleets”) to air bases in northeastern France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and a third to Norway, together with all the men, equipment, communications, supplies, and fuel needed to maintain the nearly 3,000 aircraft involved. Runways at most of the existing military airfields (
Luftflotte
2 alone would require more than thirty operational airfields spread out from Amsterdam to Le Havre) would need to be lengthened and reinforced for the use of heavily loaded bombers, and protected with flak (antiaircraft) batteries (which in Germany, unlike the United Kingdom, came under the control of the
Luftwaffe
rather than the army); huge numbers of vehicles of every size and type would need to be assembled quickly; and sophisticated repair and service facilities would have to be put in place. Admittedly, this was the kind of thing the Germans excelled at—Milch was a gifted organizer, who, unlike several of his rivals in the
Luftwaffe
, surrounded himself with skilled technicians—but it was still a big job. Then too, although the French air force had not put up much of a fight, the
Luftwaffe
had suffered substantial losses in the Norwegian campaign and in the attacks on Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. More than 1,500 German aircraft were lost—most of them, inevitably, to accidents—and although a substantial number of the aircrews survived and returned to their units to fight again, there was, unavoidably, a certain amount of wastage, confusion, and delay.

Though nobody was about to bring it to Göring’s attention, the
Luftwaffe
, in fact, had not been built with this kind of task in mind. Its successes in Spain, Poland, Norway, and the attack on France had been won against weaker air forces or none, and with the
Luftwaffe
acting in support of the German army, in the role of flying artillery, rather than as a long-range strategic weapon in its own right. The bombing of Guernica, Warsaw, and Rotterdam had brought a chill to the hearts of those who believed the bomber would always get through, but none of these cities had a first-rate, modern, technologically advanced air defense system, or fighter squadrons equipped with aircraft that were as good as those of the
Luftwaffe
. In contrast, Britain had a modern air defense system, and its fighter aircraft were in some respects better than those of the
Luftwaffe
and flown by pilots whose morale, skill, and spirit were second to none.

Göring was, in fact, about to launch a new kind of war; and it was a war for which the British were better prepared than he (or anyone else) supposed. Over the past decade they had devoted an astonishing amount of thought, innovation, and preparation to it.

The story of how that came to be is perhaps the least appreciated part of the Battle of Britain, for ironically the RAF’s victory was made possible only by the far-reaching and courageous decisions of the same governments that would be later reviled as consisting of “appeasers,” “guilty men” (in the words of a best-selling polemic),
⁴
and “the men of Munich.”

V
ictory against the
Luftwaffe
in 1940 came about neither by luck nor by last-minute improvisation. In photographs of the period, the fighter pilots tend to look like young, carefree, happy warriors, if there is such a thing, but the reason they won the Battle of Britain was above all that Fighter Command was prepared for it.

The architect of this victory was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who took over as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of RAF Fighter Command on its formation in 1936. The fighters, such as they were—for they were then all biplanes with an open cockpit, two guns, and fixed landing gear—had been part of a more amorphous organization, Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB), which everybody agreed was inadequate to its task. Dowding had transferred from the Royal Artillery to the infant Royal Flying Corps during World War I, had commanded ADGB in 1929 and 1930, and since then had served as Air Member for Research and Development on the Air Council, the RAF equivalent of the army’s General Staff. In that capacity, Dowding, a man who had the patience to listen to scientists and engineers, and to ask questions until he understood exactly what they were proposing, learned more about the technology of air defense than any other senior air officer in the world, particularly in two areas that were then in their infancy: the “black art” of radio direction finding, and high-frequency ground-to-air communication. Dowding, in fact, had early on in his flying career been the first man to send a radio signal from an aircraft to the ground, an innovation in which nobody at the time was interested.

Dowding was, in many respects, a remote, stubborn, difficult man with strong opinions—it was not for nothing that his nickname was “Stuffy”—and he could never charm politicians or his fellow air marshals, an inability that would eventually be his undoing; but on the subject of air warfare he knew what he was talking about. He had in his head an airman’s three-dimensional sense of how to fight a battle in the sky over southern England, and he understood that it would involve combining the newest and most radical scientific ideas about radio direction finding
*
on a grand scale with the latest kinds of radio communications equipment and a totally new breed of fighter airplane into an efficient, tightly controlled, well-led organization, linking fighters, antiaircraft guns, and ground observers into a single unit involving thousands of people and technology which did not as yet exist. With those who did not share his vision or sense of urgency he could be bloody-minded indeed.

Dowding was a lonely man, a widower with one son (who would become a fighter pilot under his father’s command in the Battle of Britain), humorless, exacting, somewhat inarticulate except about the things that seemed really important to him, given to various crank ideas (in his old age he would devote himself almost entirely to spiritualism), and perhaps for that reason unafraid of new or seemingly crackpot scientific schemes and of challenging authority—indeed, as we shall see, he probably saved Britain by standing up to Winston Churchill during the great crisis of France’s defeat, and paid a stiff price for his blunt, outspoken refusal to be bullied, persuaded, silenced, or coerced by the prime minister. In his own gruff, shy way Dowding was strangely sentimental about his fighter pilots, whom he sometimes referred to as “my chicks,” and in his official farewell letter to them on giving up his beloved command, he addressed them, like a Mr. Chips in uniform, as “My dear Fighter Boys.”

It would be difficult to imagine a person less like Göring or Göring’s commanders. So far as one can tell, Dowding had no hobbies or recreations—to a remarkable degree, he felt the hot wind of war at his back, urging him on to prepare Fighter Command for battle, despite doubt, interference, and hostility, and, as it would prove, he succeeded just in time. His technical expertise and his imagination on the subject of air warfare were the impetus that produced radar, the eight-gun Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire, and the “brain” of Fighter Command, a centralized Fighter Control, the futuristic Operations Room at Fighter Command Headquarters, which was in constant communication with the radar plotters and the fighter squadrons, and from which the battle could be systematically observed, controlled, and led.

Above all, in 1936 Dowding was perhaps the one man of consequence in the United Kingdom—perhaps in the world—who did
not
believe that the bomber would “always get through.”

Stanley Baldwin’s statement in the House of Commons represented accepted wisdom in the 1920s and 1930s. Toward the end of World War I the Germans had made a major effort to bomb London and coastal cities in the south of England, first using zeppelins, then using big Gotha biplane bombers with twin Mercedes motors and a seventy-seven-foot wingspan, hoping to weaken British resolve by the application of
Schrecklicheit
(frightfulness), always the fallback position of German policy. Though compared with what happened in the next world war the damage and the number of deaths were small (835 British civilians were killed and 1,990 wounded), the bombing campaign, not surprisingly, made a huge impression. Unfortunately for the Germans, however, the net effect was merely to increase British determination to win the war.

Once the war was over, and aircraft gradually started to become larger and more powerful (by very small degrees—in 1932, when Baldwin made his remark about the bomber, the bombers of the world’s air forces still resembled those of 1917 and 1918 much more than they did those of 1939), the belief grew that the next war, if there was one, would begin with huge bombing raids that would annihilate great cities on the first day. This illusion was in part the work of military propagandists for “strategic bombing,” such as General Giulio Douhet in Italy and General “Billy” Mitchell in the United States, and in part the work of senior air force officers, who promised the politicians that a big bombing force would serve as the best deterrent to war, and would be much cheaper to build up and maintain than a big army—an argument that appealed both to those who sought peace and to those who sought economy in governmental spending.

Of course, nowhere did these fleets of bombers exist: the United States, for instance, was thousands of miles away from any country it might possibly need to bomb, and in any case was in the middle of the Great Depression and was resolved never to fight another war. But strangely enough, the idea of the bomber as the inevitable, ultimate weapon of the future became more widely accepted in Britain than in any other country, to the dismay of the admirals, who still believed the answer was more and larger battleships. The French were not much interested in bombers (perhaps because they lived in fear that their beloved Paris would be bombed), or indeed in military aircraft of any kind; Marshal Foch himself had said, “Aviation is a sport—for war it’s worth zero.” To protect itself from the Germans, France continued to rely on a mass army of citizen conscripts, trained by fulfilling, with whatever reluctance, their annual period of military service; and on immense, elaborate fortifications, particularly the famous Maginot Line. The Germans, forbidden by the terms of the peace treaty to rearm, dreamed first of all of rebuilding their army. The Soviet Union relied, as always, on its millions of conscript peasant soldiers. During World War I the British had put off conscription for as long as they could, as a deeply un-English notion, and the moment the war ended they swiftly demobilized their army—conscription, obligatory military service, and a large army went against every tradition of British life; and the idea of a small regular army of long-term professional soldiers, commanded by officers who were so far as possible members of the upper class or the younger sons of the landowning aristocracy, was deeply treasured. In the circumstances, the idea of a powerful bombing force whose very existence would prevent war, and which would involve a comparatively small number of professional airmen, was undeniably attractive. Nobody in the United Kingdom, from King George V down, wanted to repeat the experience of World War I, in which more than 750,000 Britons had been killed and more than 2 million seriously wounded, most of them in the mud of Flanders.

The idea of the bomber as the weapon of the future—even the near future—moved rapidly from the quiet places in Whitehall where British military policy was somewhat lackadaisically discussed—for it was not one of the subjects in which Baldwin showed much interest—to make its way into the mind of the public, thanks to the immense power of the popular press, and was reinforced by the growing power of what was beginning to be called popular culture, i.e., radio, magazines, popular fiction, and above all films. In 1936, my uncle, Alexander Korda, a friend and admirer of H. G. Wells, produced an ambitious, immensely successful futuristic film based on Wells’s novel
The Shape of Things to Come
, which began with the destruction of a major European city (recognizably London) by a huge fleet of bombers darkening the sky, without a declaration of war. Designed by my father, Vincent Korda,
Things to Come
held audiences breathless, presenting them with a convincing picture of a world in which war would come, literally, out of the blue, wiping out whole cities in one blow with bombs and poison gas. Alex and my father were not, to be sure, attempting to buttress the arguments of the air marshals for more money, or to instill fear in the public; they were merely attempting to brings Wells’s ideas to the screen as faithfully (and dramatically) as possible. But the film (which deeply impressed Hitler) nevertheless had an immense effect on the public, and indeed on the government.

For despite the phlegmatic, calm, peace-loving appearance of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin—a man who looked exactly like a character in a novel by R. F. Delderfield about the English countryside, puffing contentedly on his pipe and determined to avoid full-scale rearmament and war, or even
talk
about full-scale rearmament and war—some radical notions were quietly being put into preparation. Baldwin, a cousin of Rudyard Kipling, had a somewhat inflated reputation for sagacity, blunt talk, and plain common sense, thought to be part of his heritage from a family of wealthy, tough-minded West Midland iron-masters.
*
It was also his misfortune to be almost comically uninterested in foreign affairs and foreigners at a time when nothing was more important, and even his most sympathetic biographer, G. M. Young, notes that Baldwin “would ostentatiously close his eyes [in cabinet meetings] when foreign affairs were under discussion. ‘Wake me up,’ he would say, ‘when you are finished with that.’” Foreigners “made him peevish, or sent him to sleep.”
¹
He liked to give the impression that there was nothing much on his mind except keeping the Conservative Party in power, and long, quiet country weekends of taking walks and reading Trollope, but in fact he was a shrewd, devious politician, who deftly managed the House of Commons—the Labour members liked him as much as the members of his own party did—and easily outflanked Churchill during the abdication crisis. Nobody understood the British public of the 1930s better than Stanley Baldwin, or was more trusted by the public. In Young’s words, “They trusted him, they believed in him, less for anything he had done or was likely to do, than for being himself.” Unlike Churchill, whose reputation was badly singed by his outspoken, belligerent support for “the King’s matter,” as Baldwin tactfully called Edward VIII’s determination to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, Baldwin had instantly understood that however much the British might like their young king, they were not about to put up with his marrying a twice-divorced American adventuress from Baltimore.

Baldwin, though he was notoriously indolent and often never bothered to read the papers that were sent to him—a failing that was to backfire on him with regard to the air estimates—in his own way faced unpleasant facts once they could no longer be avoided, whether they were on the subject of Mrs. Simpson or Hitler. He not only said, “The bomber will always get through”; he
believed
it, and drew the consequences. First of all, there must be no war, and British policy should above all be directed toward giving the Germans no reason to start one, and of course toward avoiding the awkward, misplaced continental entanglements that had dragged a reluctant, appalled, divided Liberal government into war against Germany in 1914. Second, steps should be taken—without alarming the public, of course—to deal with the consequences if Hitler was mad enough to start a war. Behind the scenes, in the staid world of the civil service, bureaucrats would soon be drawing up plans to have hundreds of thousands of cheap plywood coffins made and stored in strategic locations, to supply the entire population of Britain with gas masks, to dig trenches in the treasured lawns of London’s parks as emergency air-raid shelters, and, even more alarmingly, to identify convenient sites for mass graves, should they be needed.

This dark view of the future, though concealed from the public, was echoed in Winston Churchill’s speeches calling for rearmament and a stronger air force, in which he painted a picture of future war in startling, if somber colors for the House of Commons.
*
“We may…,” he said, “be confronted on some occasion with a visit from an ambassador, and may have to give an answer in a very few hours; and if that answer is not satisfactory, within the next few hours the crash of bombs exploding in London and the cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will warn us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences.”
²

Addressing what he took to be Baldwin’s reluctance to spend more money on the RAF, Churchill predicted that no “less than 30,000 or 40,000 people would be killed or maimed” in a German bombing attack on London, and that as many as “3,000,000 or 4,000,000 people would be driven out [of London] into the open country around the Metropolis.” This apocalyptic vision, not unlike that of H. G. Wells, was not something most members of Parliament, on either side of the House, wished to contemplate—nor, as it happened, was the vision, for the moment, a likely one—and did almost as much harm to Churchill’s political reputation as his support for Edward VIII’s marriage. To the general public, his talk of “cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke” made Churchill seem like a “wild man,” and also something of a warmonger, and to most people Baldwin seemed an even more steady and reliable figure by comparison.