The Grand Alliance (11 page)

The heaviest blows did not fall till April. On the eighth the concentration was on Coventry, and in the rest of the country the sharpest impact was at Portsmouth. London had heavy attacks on the sixteenth and seventeenth; over twenty-three hundred people were killed, more than three thousand seriously injured. In this third and final phase the enemy went on trying to destroy most of our principal ports by attacks prolonged in some cases over a whole week.

Plymouth was attacked from April 21 to 29, and though

The Grand Alliance

71

decoy fires helped to save the dockyard, this was only at the expense of the city. The climax came on May 1, when Liverpool and the Mersey were attacked for seven successive nights. Seventy-six thousand people were made homeless and three thousand killed or injured. Sixty-nine out of a hundred and forty-four berths were put out of action, and the tonnage landed for a while was cut to a quarter. Had the enemy persisted, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been even more closely run than it was. But as usual he turned away. For two nights he battered Hull heavily, where forty thousand people had their dwellings destroyed, the food stores were wrecked, and the marine engineering works were crippled for nearly two months. In that month he struck again at Belfast, already twice raided.

On April 12, as Chancellor of Bristol University, I conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws on Mr. Winant, the United States Ambassador, on Dr. J. B. Conant, President of Harvard University, and on Mr. Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia. My wife came with me. Our train lay for the night in a siding in the open country, but we could see and hear the heavy air raid on the city of Bristol. We pulled into the station early in the morning and went straight to the hotel. There I met a number of dignitaries, and almost immediately started on a tour of the most stricken parts of the town. The Air Raid Services were feverishly at work and people were still being dug out of the ruins. The ordeal had been severe, but the spirit of the citizens was invincible. At one of the rest centres a number of old women whose homes had been wrecked and who still seemed stunned were sitting there, the picture of dejection. When I came in they wiped away their tears and cheered wildly for King and Country.

The Grand Alliance

72

The ceremony went forward as planned. I spent an hour driving round the worst hit places, and then repaired to the University. Everything proceeded with strict formality, but the large building next to the University was still burning and the bright academic robes of some of the principal actors did not conceal the soaked and grimy uniforms of their night’s toil The whole scene was moving.

Many of those here today [I said] have been all night at their posts, and all have been under the fire of the enemy in heavy and protracted bombardment. That you should gather in this way is a mark of fortitude and phlegm, of a courage and detachment from material affairs, worthy of all that we have learned to believe of ancient Rome or of modern Greece.

I go about the country whenever I can escape for a few hours or for a day from my duty at headquarters, and I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see, side by side with the devastation and amid the ruins, quiet, confident, bright, and smiling eyes, beaming with a consciousness of being associated with a cause far higher and wider than any human or personal issue. I see the spirit of an unconquerable people. I see a spirit bred in freedom, nursed in a tradition which has come down to us through the centuries, and which will surely at this moment, this turning-point in the history of the world, enable us to bear our part in such a way that none of our race who come after us will have any reason to cast reproach upon their sires.

Meanwhile the Wizard War was unfolding in its own strange way. The forging of its first new weapons has already found mention in an earlier volume.
2
The plans for the air defence of Great Britain had, as early as the autumn of 1937, been rewritten round the assumption that the

The Grand Alliance

73

promises made by our scientists for the still unproven radar would be kept. The first five stations of the coastal radar chain, the five guarding the Thames Estuary, had watched Mr. Chamberlain’s aeroplane go and come on its peace missions of September, 1938. Eighteen stations from Dundee to Portsmouth began in the spring of 1939 a twenty-four-hour watch, not to be interrupted in the next six years.

These stations were the watchdogs of the air-raid warning service; they spared us alike grave losses in war production and intolerable burdens on our civil defence workers. They spared the anti-aircraft gun crews needless and tiring hours at action stations. They saved us from the exhaustion of man and machine that would have doomed our matchless but slender fighter force had it been compelled to maintain standing patrols. They could not give the accuracy required for night-time interception, but they enabled the day fighters to await their prey at the most favourable altitudes and aspects for attack. In their decisive contribution to victory in the day battles they were supported and supplemented by other stations of new technical design,
3
which gave warning – all too brief, but invaluable – of the approach of the low fliers.

During 1941 we went on deflecting the German beams despite their various improvements. An example may be cited. On the night of May 8 the Germans planned two attacks, the first upon the Rolls-Royce Works at Derby and the second on Nottingham. Through our interference with their beams, which were set upon Derby, they bombed instead Nottingham, where small fires were still burning from the previous night. Their original error then carried their second attack to the Vale of Belvoir, about as far from The Grand Alliance

74

Nottingham as Nottingham is from Derby. The German communiqué claimed the destruction of the Rolls-Royce Works at Derby, which they never got near. Two hundred and thirty high-explosive bombs and a large number of incendiaries were, however, unloaded in the open country.

The total casualties there were two chickens.

The worst attack was the last. On May 10 the enemy returned to London with incendiary bombs. He lit more than two thousand fires, and, by the smashing of nearly a hundred and fifty water mains, coupled with the low tide in the Thames, he stopped us putting them out. At six o’clock next morning hundreds were reported as out of control, and four were still going on the night of the thirteenth. It was the most destructive attack of the whole night Blitz. Five docks and seventy-one key-points, half of which were factories, had been hit. All but one of the main railway stations were blocked for weeks, and the through routes were not fully opened till early June. Over three thousand people were killed or injured. In other respects also it was historic. It destroyed the House of Commons. One single bomb created ruin for years. We were, however, thankful that the Chamber was empty. On the other hand, our batteries and night fighters destroyed sixteen enemy planes, the maximum we had yet attained in night fighting, and largely the fruits of our winter’s toil in the Wizard War.

This, though we did not know it, was the enemy’s parting fling. On May 22 Kesselring shifted the headquarters of his air fleet to Posen, and at the beginning of June the whole force was moved to the east. Nearly three years were to pass before our Civil Defence organisation in London had to deal with the “baby Blitz” of February, 1944, and the later onslaught of the rockets and the flying bombs. In the twelve months from June, 1940, to June, 1941, our civilian The Grand Alliance

75

casualties were 43,381 killed and 50,856 seriously injured, a total of 94,237.

Except for their radar aids to anti-aircraft gunnery the enemy had hitherto concentrated on offensive devices like the beams, and 1941 was far spent before they felt the need of looking after themselves. In Britain, of course, we had trusted to our large and costly navigation schools for finding our targets, and thought of radar primarily for self-preservation. After the beams had been mastered and as things got better generally, we studied German radar for the purpose of removing obstacles to our hitting back. In February, 1941, we found and photographed for the first time a German radar station for detecting aircraft, and almost at once we picked up its transmissions. Having found this specimen near Cherbourg, we searched for others like it along the western coast-line of occupied Europe by photographic reconnaissance and secret agents.

By the middle of 1941, the Royal Air Force was seeking to make heavy night attacks on Germany. To do this we had to know all about their defensive devices. These were likely to depend, as ours did, largely upon radar. From a study of German radar on the coast we gradually worked our way back to the German night-fighter defences. These stretched in a great belt running from Schleswig-Holstein through Northwest Germany and Holland to the Franco-Belgian frontier. But neither our new measures nor those of the enemy played a great part during the latter months of 1941.

The German bomber force had been hopefully scheduled to begin its return from Russia six weeks after the invasion.

Had it returned, it would have been supported in its attack on Britain by many new beam stations with more powerful transmitters along the Channel coast to help it bludgeon its way through the English jamming. It would have encountered many new transmitters on our side to distort

The Grand Alliance

76

and divert the new beams, as well as greatly improved radar on our night fighters. The ever-spreading character of the Russian entanglement prevented this new battle of the beams, and the great radio efforts on both sides remained for the time being unused.

On Saturday, May 10, I was spending the week-end at Ditchley. After dinner news arrived of the heavy air raid on London. There was nothing that I could do about it, so I watched the Marx Brothers in a comic film which my hosts had arranged. I went out twice to inquire about the air raid, and heard it was bad. The merry film clacked on, and I was glad of the diversion. Presently a secretary told me that the Duke of Hamilton wished to speak to me from Scotland.