A Summer Bright and Terrible (27 page)

Day after day they fell, and one by one Dowding’s
airfields went out of action. Yet as each raid came over, somehow a few more
Spitfires rose to meet it, and as each day passed, the date for invasion loomed
closer and closer while still remaining indefinably away. Hitler, in
consultation with Admiral Erich Raeder, Goring, and their combined
meteorological staffs, had scheduled it for September 15 to take advantage of
the unusual combination of high tides, calm waters, and a full moon. With the
onset of
Adlerangriff,
Goring had promised that not only would the
waters be calm by then, but the sides would be free of RAF fighters. Rut as
August turned into September, those “last few Spitfires” somehow continued to
appear.

Sometimes they appeared too late, and these
instances gave Goring the impression that he was nearly at his goal. But he
didn’t know what was really going on; he didn’t understand the ongoing
contretemps between Park and Leigh-Mallory.

Every one of 11 Group’s squadrons was scrambled
every day, and there wasn’t a single day when all their planes returned to
base. They came back to the ground smoking and skidding along farmers’ meadows
or crashing in flames or spinning down with a dead pilot fallen over the
controls; they fell into the sea and into country villages and into the streets
of Birmingham and Portland. And the next day, each squadron would be able to
send up only a dozen planes instead of eighteen, and then only ten planes,
eight planes, a half dozen . . .

No. 11 Group could no longer defend their own
bases, but when they called on 12 Group for help they got something less than
what was needed. Hornchurch and North Weald were attacked again, and again the
call went to Bader. But while he was circling over his own base to the
northeast, gathering up his forces, Hornchurch and North Weald were destroyed.
On the following days, when more bombers came in toward Debden, they called on
12 Group again, and again the large force came too late; Debden was devastated.

Bader argued angrily to Leigh-Mallory that he
could do the job if only he were given a decent warning. Leigh-Mallory didn’t
tell him that no one could give him that warning in time, the radar-communications
network was doing all it could, and that’s all there was. It took about four
minutes for the radar warning to reach the squadron and only six minutes for
the Luftwaffe bombers to cross the Channel and approach their targets. But
Leigh-Mallory ignored this fact of life and told Bader he was right, to go on
doing what he could.

At the end of August, a raid came in against
Biggin Hill while all of 11 Group’s fighters were already in action against
other raids. Again 12 Group failed to respond in time, and while the ground
crews were trying to clear the damage, another raid swept in and destroyed the
gas and water mains, the electric cables, hangars, depots, and workshops. As
the battle raged to a climax, Biggin Hill, the most important of Dowding’s
airfields, was out of action.

Another raid went at North Weald again, and
once more Bader took his squadron around in circles, forming up into strength.
As they did, he was thinking how best to organize his attack. But this was the
classic mistake: If each squadron leader organized his own attack, Dowding’s
system was useless. Bader never did realize this. Instead, he was thinking that
since it was late afternoon, if the Jerries had any sense they’d circle around
and come in from the west, with the sun at their backs.

The Sector Controller, analyzing the radar
data, steered him from the ground onto Vector 190, taking them almost due south
from their base at Coltishall. Bader ignored him, wheeling his Group out on
Vector 260, bringing them around to the west, trying to get up-sun of where he
knew
the Jerries would be.

The Controller told him to maintain fifteen
thousand feet altitude. But Bader was always aware of “the Hun in the sun,” and
he didn’t want to be looking up into the glare above to find the enemy. He
soared up to twenty thousand feet, where he waited, circling patiently, twenty
miles west and five thousand feet above where the Controller had sent him.

And this time he was right. A group of thirty
Heinkels with Me no escorts, maybe fifty or sixty in all, came in below him. He
had positioned his squadron perfectly, and he wheeled over and took his lads
down onto the enemy.

It was just as he had always proclaimed. His
fighters didn’t quite reach them before they dropped their bombs, but they
massacred them as they fled, claiming twelve aircraft shot down without loss. “In
a few lethal moments all Bader’s long-held beliefs had been confirmed,” his
biographer would later write.

But were they? The enemy attack had wiped out
another of Dowding’s precious airfields. Bader’s argument was that, despite
this successful attack, the Luftwaffe couldn’t accept such high losses and
would soon have to back off. It would have been a good argument—if he had
actually shot down twelve of the bombers. But Luftwaffe records found after the
war showed that the force had lost only two bombers. Again and again in the
next few days, when Bader’s Big Wing formation did manage to get into action,
this would remain a feature of their claims, for with so many fighters
attacking at once, several planes would be aiming at the same target. In the
turmoil, no pilot would notice the others, and when the target was shot down,
each pilot would quite honestly but mistakenly claim it.

Furthermore, although Bader in his enthusiasm
couldn’t realize this, the interception had been made in perfect position
because Bader had
guessed
the enemy’s intentions right, but you can’t fight
a war on guesses. No one can guess right all the time. The Luftwaffe bombers
often came straight and hard at their target, and if they had done that on this
day, Bader would have been sitting all alone five thousand feet above and
fifteen miles west of where the enemy was, doodling along helplessly as he so
often was.

Dowding’s defence system relied on radar, but
radar information was useless unless it was organized by Controllers who could
see where all the raids were going. It was a complex system, and all the parts
had to fit together if it was to work. The radar stations would pick up an
enemy coming in and would report by land line directly to the Filter Room at
Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory. The radar signal would be
followed until the bombers’ track was established and their target tentatively
identified, and then Group HQ and the relevant sector stations were notified.
At the same time, or at least as soon as the bombers passed over the coast,
ground observers would spot them and send their information on to Observer
Corps Centre, and thence to the sector stations and Groups concerned, usually 11
Group. There Keith Park would decide which sectors to activate, the sector
commander would decide which aerodrome should be contacted, and each aerodrome
commander would decide which squadrons were to be scrambled. Once airborne, the
fighters were directed by radio to make the interception.

Most importantly, the system depended on the
fighter pilots’ following the instructions of the radar-directed Controllers.
This enabled the Controllers to direct the entire battle, whereas a fighter
pilot could see only what was in front of him. Finally, the Controllers had to
know not only where the enemy was but also where their own aircraft were so that
they could direct reinforcements where needed. Bader’s guesses as to the
Luftwaffe’s intentions on each raid were the stuff of romantic, dashing heroes;
it made good entertainment but very bad strategy. When it worked it looked
good, but only because of the overblown claims of enemy destroyed, and usually
it didn’t work at all.

Leigh-Mallory should have clamped him down,
should have explained that Bader’s job was not to think, and certainly not to
guess, but to follow orders and to fight. It’s always hard for the man in the
thick of the action to realize that he doesn’t have the whole picture in front
of him. It’s hard for him to obey orders when he thinks he knows better than
the fat cats sitting safely on the ground. It’s hard, but it’s necessary.

And meanwhile the system was being beaten down.
Biggin Hill, the pivot of 11 Group’s work, was virtually deserted; one squadron
still operated from there, but the others had been moved and all the supporting
operations were useless. Another five of the most used airfields were out of
action, while the six sector stations were barely limping along. The forward
airfields at Manston and Lympne had been abandoned. As August spilled over into
the first week of September, Dowding’s intricate system was crumbling under the
onslaught.

Those last few Spitfires, however, were still
coming up to continue the fight. Hitler ordered the invasion timetable reset,
to give Goring another few days to finish the job. Operation Sea Lion, the
invasion of Britain, would commence on September 20.

Twenty-seven

And then, in a fit of pique, Hitler lost
the war.

Ten days previously—or rather, on the
night
of August 24—German bombers unloaded their explosives and incendiaries on
London, and nobody knew why. Actually, nobody knew why they hadn’t hit London
earlier; that was the first mystery, and one that has never been satisfactorily
answered. We know now that Hitler had specifically ordered the sanctity of
London, but the reason for this decision is lost in the mists of his mind. The
Luftwaffe was free to bomb anywhere else in England: houses, shops, hospitals,
factories—he didn’t care. Why did he keep London safe?

Later in the war, when the Nazis were forced to
evacuate Paris, he gave orders that the French city was to be burned to the ground.
Had the German commander followed that order, nothing of military significance
would have been gained; Hitler just wanted to destroy the city. So the idea of
his respect for a wonderful city is ludicrous, and we have to forget the idea
that he spared London for that reason.

Another idea is that he didn’t want to make the
English so angry that they wouldn’t agree to a negotiated peace. This is hard
to square with his orders that the English could be bombed anywhere and
everywhere else. The most reasonable position is to accept that it’s impossible
to understand the mind of a dead psychopath and to try instead to understand
why London was bombed on August 24 and how this action and the resulting
reaction changed the course of the war.

The cold facts are that at ten o’clock on that
night, more than a hundred bombers flew up the Thames and unloaded their
explosives and incendiaries on East Ham and Stepney, Bethnal Green and
Finsbury, and the City. The attacks started seventy-six fires, most of them in
the poorest sections of town.

There are three competing theories as to why
Hitler’s standing order to leave London alone was ignored. The first of these
goes back to the Luftwaffe’s attacks during the preceding day, in which all the
airfields ringing London were attacked. This theory looks on those attacks as
the beginning of the assault on London, but that doesn’t make sense to me. The
night bombers of August were not bothered by fighters, not even remotely. Since
the beginning of the war, only one bomber had been shot down by a night
fighter, so it would make no sense to begin the night bombing of London by
trying to knock out the fighter airfields, especially since all of 11 Group’s
airfields, not just those close to the city, were in position to defend London.
The reason for attacking the airfields ringing London was clearly just a
continuation of the attack on all of Fighter Command’s fields.

Moreover, a decision by Hitler to finally hit
London would leave its mark in the records of the Third Reich, and although
extensive searches have been made through all these records, no such
operational order exists. On the contrary, it is clear from the German records
that the attack was unauthorized.

The second theory takes these records into
account and makes sense if we modify it a bit. It states that the bombing was
simply a navigational mistake. But while day bombers fly in compact formations,
night bombers fly individual routes. How could more than a hundred bombers make
the same mistake? This is especially difficult to accept since the Thames River
flashes in the moonlight like a neon arrow pointing the way to the heart of
London, where it winds back and forth as if signalling, “Here it is!”

Many night raids used the Thames arrow to begin
their operations, following it to London and then dispersing to the airfields
and towns around it. On the night in question there were clouds drifting over
the moon, so it really wouldn’t be hard for the bombers to become lost over the
blacked-out country. Imagine now that you’re in such a bomber, searching for
your assigned target, having no luck, trying to find your way, and at the same
time, you are desperately trying to avoid the searchlights and antiaircraft
fire. Looking out into the darkness in fear of a night fighter, you suddenly
see a splash of bombs ahead. All it would have taken was one bomber to panic
amid the antiaircraft fire and drop its bombs on the first bit of land it saw
when the clouds parted for a moment, and then all the others would think, “Well,
there’s a target. It might not be mine, but it’s something.” And as a few
bombers dropped their bombs on the first explosions, the fires below would
attract the others, as bees to the scent of a flower, or mosquitoes to the
scent of my wife.