The Battle of Britain (32 page)

After the Blitzkreig which, in the course of a few springtime weeks, brought about the defeat and occupation of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, Hitler not only hoped but also believed that Britain would sue for peace on the best terms she could get. The Führer, in fact, would probably have made those terms superficially attractive. For about a month he was, so to speak, sitting by the telephone waiting for Britain to call. He waited in vain. And so, early in July, he issued his Directive:

‘As England, in spite of her hopeless military position, has so far shown herself unwilling to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin preparations for and, if necessary, to carry out the invasion of England.

‘This operation is dictated by the necessity to eliminate Great Britain as a base from which the war against Germany can be fought. If necessary the island will be occupied . . . I therefore issue the following orders:

1. The landing operation must be a surprise crossing on a broad front extending approximately from Ramsgate to a point west of the Isle of Wight . . . The preparations . . . must be concluded by the middle of August.

2. The following preparations must be undertaken to make a landing in England possible:

(a) The English air force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops . . .'

Note that the first priority was the elimination of the RAF. In issuing that invasion order – code-named ‘Operation Sealion' – Hitler was backed and supported by the assurance of Reichsmarschall Goering that the Luftwaffe could bring about the required defeat and elimination of Fighter Command. There is no doubt that if Goering's two operational commanders – Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commanding Luftflotte 2, and Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, commanding Luftflotte 3 – had been given a choice they would have opted for delay. Although the German air force had carried all before it in the spring campaign, it had not done so without suffering heavy losses. Different authorities give different figures, but the total would have been at least 2,000, including those lost during the campaign, but not due to enemy action. Certainly the number of bombers available at the beginning of July was still some 15 per cent less than at the beginning of March.

Across the Channel the two main operational commanders, Dowding and Park, were also at the head of a force which had by no means recovered from the part it had been compelled to play in the Battle of France and its aftermath. Dowding's determined efforts in resisting pressures upon him to commit more and more of his Command's precious fighters to the Battle of France are part of popular history. It may therefore come as a surprise to many to learn that every one of his squadrons, with the exception only of three based in Scotland, became engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, in that spring campaign. The few weeks of respite following the completion of the Dunkirk evacuation were used to good advantage to rebuild the Command's strength in terms of both men and aircraft. But Dowding and Park must both have prayed for the longest possible postponement of the onslaught.

Dowding and Park – they were the key men from start to finish. It is impossible to over-emphasise the dominating as well as the crucial role which those officers played in the Battle. It was fortunate indeed for Britain that two such remarkable men stood in the breach at the time. It is no less fortunate that, by and large, they were allowed to get on with it, to do it their way, without interference either from the Air Council or from Government. It was also perhaps no
less fortunate for our country that Kesselring and Sperrle were by contrast subject to the constant intervention of their Commander-in-Chief, Goering, and also, at a critical time and in a critical way, of Hitler himself.

An earlier chapter of this book describes Fighter Command's infrastructure and organisation, built up in the two or three years leading to 1940, and its astonishingly complete and effective communications system, involving a vast and exclusive telephone and teleprinter network – rightly described by John Terraine as ‘a magnificently quick and secret achievement of the Post Office' – which enabled the Dowding system to function effectively. And, of course, it was the Dowding system, very much and very personally the Commander-in-Chief's own creation.

Future generations of British people should never forget what they owe to the perspicacity and skill of this retiring, unglamorous, outwardly rather grumpy man. All too often history teaches us the sorry lessons to be learned from the experience of having the wrong men in the wrong place at the critical time. In the case of Dowding, exactly the reverse is true. And he had been in the right places for an astonishingly long time; for his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, in 1936, had been preceded by a four-year stint as a Member of the Air Council with a role which enabled him to exercise decisive influence in defining the specification and development of the planes with which in due course the Battle was to be fought.

In Keith Park, the 48-year-old New Zealander, who had first fought for Britain as an artillery soldier at Gallipoli and on the Somme, before gaining a Commission and transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, Dowding had a subordinate who was totally committed to the implementation of his Commander-in-Chief's plans and
modus operandi
. To quote Terraine once more: ‘Dowding controlled the Battle from day to day; Park controlled it from hour to hour.' It would, I believe, be impossible to over-emphasise the skill, perception and sensitivity with which that hour-to-hour control – so often, as the drama developed, hours involving tremendous stress and momentous decisions based on incomplete information – was exercised by a superb commander whose name is virtually unknown to the British public today.

The detailed tactics of the Battle of Britain have been excellently and expertly described by my old friend and comrade, Johnnie Johnson. I will not go over that ground again, but will try to pick out and illustrate the main moves and factors which, in the end, proved decisive.

The Battle is deemed, for the purposes of history, to have begun on July 10. Its first phase, as has already been described, was fought out mainly over the
Channel and along the south-east coast of England. For the Germans it was a kind of probing operation, combined with a genuine attempt to disrupt the passage of Channel convoys and to damage the harbours along their routes. But that limitation in the nature of this phase of the attack was probably not evident at all to most observers at the time. The ferocity of the engagements between Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe was clear for all to see. To the watching world, as well as to the people of Britain, it was obvious that the first moves in the intended subjugation of our islands had been set in hand.

What, then, were the reactions of Dowding and Park? They were cautious and limited. Both men believed deeply that their primary role was to defend the country against the attack of the main German bomber force, when it came. Those bombers had to destroy certain key targets if Hitler's purpose was to be achieved. Enemy activity in this opening phase did not, for the most part, fall within that category and so Dowding and Park, determined to avoid to the greatest possible extent losses in fighter-versus-fighter combat, kept their response to a minimum. Above all, Dowding stolidly refused to transfer squadrons from Nos. 12 and 13 Groups to reinforce No. 11 Group, although he did press forward with all possible despatch the establishment of No. 10 Group on Park's right flank, a move which was to pay priceless dividends in the next and critical phase of the Battle.

That phase was initiated in the beginning of August, though its full force and fury were not apparent until the middle of that month. Once again Hitler gave the order, personally, in his Directive Number 17, issued on August 1, which stated that the Luftwaffe should ‘use all forces at its disposal to destroy the British Air Force as quickly as possible'. Seven days later Goering followed this up with his own personal order to his squadrons. This stated that ‘within a short period you will wipe the British Air Force from the sky'.

The day chosen for the true initiation of that process, after some delays caused partly by adverse weather, was August 13. But the first truly major assault came two days later, when the Luftwaffe flew nearly 1,800 sorties, aimed very specifically at Fighter Command – its airfields, its ground installations, its radar stations and, of course, its aircraft and pilots as they were scrambled to intercept the invading air fleets. For the first and last time in the Battle a large-scale attack was also launched against the north-east of England. It was carried out by bombers of Luftflotte 5, which crossed the North Sea from their bases in Scandinavia escorted by twin-engined Bf 110s. They were met and destroyed in large numbers by squadrons from Nos. 12 and 13 Groups which Goering, perhaps, had imagined would by now have been diverted to the Battle in the south-east.

Seventy-six German planes were destroyed that day, according to figures assembled from records which became available after the war, for the loss of 35 of our own fighters. But our own most serious and dangerous losses were in the form of damage on the ground. Further onslaughts against Fighter Command followed daily, reaching a peak of ferocity on August 18. That was the day when Kenley, a key fighter base just a few miles south of London, received 100 enemy bombs, including direct hits on its operations room, where the controlling staff, including a large number of WAAF, displayed a degree of heroism and fortitude which fully matched that of the airmen they were directing into battle.

But if Kenley suffered most, nearly all Park's major bases, as well as others outside No. 11 Group, came under attack that day and his pilots were stretched to the limit in the air. Losses were severe; more than 70 fighters were put out of action, about half of them damaged beyond repair; a substantial number of other RAF planes of various types were also destroyed or damaged on the ground; and the communications network which enabled Dowding's system of defence to operate so effectively, beginning at the radar stations standing exposed around the coastline, was also put under great strain. In my book
Flying Start
, I summarise this phase of the Battle, as follows:

‘By the end of the first week in September the policy was beginning to pay off. Day after sunlit day an average of one thousand German airplanes came over. Dawn after chilly dawn the weary British pilots assembled at their dispersal points and waited quietly for the telephone call which would send some of them to death, even before breakfast. Night after weary night the reckoning was made and though the advantage was constantly in Britain's favour and though no doubt the German pilots were almost as bone-weary as our own and the Luftwaffe's morale must have been severely affected by the daily loss of dozens of crews and the grisly spectacle of many more aircraft returning riddled by bullets and soaked in blood – yet the steamroller technique was beginning to tell against Dowding and England.

‘The supply of pilots began to dry up. Some were shot down two or three times, but, escaping injury, returned to the battle. Others were killed before they had fired a shot. Most survived a few days before falling in the fury of the fight, either to their death or to a period of convalescence from their wounds. Dowding could not rotate his squadrons fast enough to keep pace with the losses. Squadrons in the south became depleted before others, taken out of the line to re-form, could build up their strength again. Dowding had to take experienced pilots from the squadrons which were resting and re-forming, in order to plug the gaps in other squadrons, which should really have been taken out of
the line. It was a policy of desperation and it could not last for long. In the darkness of that crisis it may well have seemed to our fifty-eight-year-old commander that it was a problem without a solution.

‘It might have been so, but for the intervention of Hitler himself, who now had one of those flashes of intuition which, from time to time, brought such dire consequences to his country. At the moment when the battle was in the balance, when the weight of Goering's strategy was coming close to success, when Fighter Command was near to breaking point – at that precise moment of crisis something else broke. It was Hitler's patience. The Führer spoke and Goering obeyed. The point and purpose of the German attack was diverted from the destruction of the RAF to the cowing and subjugation of London.

‘It was the turning point. London burned; but Britain was saved.'

For those who want them, the statistics are all available now, honed down by careful historical research to fine limits of accuracy. Indeed, they are here between the covers of this book. They do no more or less, I believe, than support and illustrate my simplified account. They show that during the second half of August and the beginning of September the Royal Air Force was bleeding very severely. It was bleeding to the extent that its ability to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over south-east England was slipping away. In other words, we were coming close to losing the Battle. And that was happening because the Germans continued relentlessly to focus their attack against Fighter Command, against its planes, its pilots, its airfields, its entire apparatus. For a time the flow of new pilots and new planes into Dowding's command fell short of the losses. And, in the squadrons, the survivors were suffering intense fatigue.

It is all too easy to over-simplify. But it really does seem obvious to me that if Hitler had not at that moment diverted the attack from the air defence system to London and other cities the outcome would most probably have been different. The move, however, did nothing to lessen the strain on Dowding, Park and their pilots. There was much hard air fighting still to come, including the day, September 15, which has long been marked and celebrated as ‘Battle of Britain Day'; the day when Goering, obedient to his Führer's command, threw every available bomber and fighter against London; the day when Churchill, watching the build-up of this huge enemy force and the response of our fighters as plotted on the table of the operations room at No. 11 Group, turned to Park and asked: ‘How many fighters have you left?' and Park replied ‘None, sir.'