The Second World War (16 page)

German losses, particularly in dive-bombers, were running so high, however, that on 15 August Goering was already beginning to institute a change of plan, and of commanders. Doubters like Osterkampf were promoted out of front-line responsibility, and aggressive young leaders (like Adolf Galland, who would shortly be decorated with the Knight’s Cross by Hitler – reluctantly, since he ‘looked Jewish’) were promoted into their place. Goering outlined to them the objectives of the third stage in the Battle of Britain: the RAF fighter airfields. Bad weather averted the inception of this effort, the first genuine concentration of force that OKL (the Luftwaffe high command) had ordered since the battle was undertaken. Not until 24 August did the RAF feel its effect, but then with alarm. Manston, the most forward of its fighter stations, was put out of action by a determined strike, and North Weald, in the north-east London suburbs, was badly damaged. At Manston the ground staff were demoralised, taking to the air-raid shelters and refusing to emerge. The Luftwaffe flew 1000 sorties that day and destroyed 22 RAF fighters for the loss of 38 of its own aircraft. There was worse to come: on 30 August and 4 September serious damage was inflicted on aircraft factories, while Biggin Hill, a main fighter station covering London, was attacked six times in three days, the operations room destroyed and seventy ground staff killed or wounded. Between 24 August and 6 September Fighter Command lost 290 aircraft in constant defensive engagements; the Luftwaffe lost 380 aircraft, but only half of those were fighters.

The Luftwaffe had begun to win the battle – but not fast enough for Hitler’s and Goering’s patience. The autumnal gales threatened. If the invasion barges were to be got across the Channel Narrows in 1940 Britain’s resistance would have to be broken in the next few weeks: Fighter Command would have to be beaten in the air so that the Royal Navy could be bombed out of the Channel. On 31 August OKL decided that on 7 September the
Schwerpunkt
(focus of attack) would be shifted from the airfields to London. Thitherto it had been spared; as an OKW order of 24 August stated: ‘Attacks against the London area and terror attacks are reserved for the Führer’s decision.’ He had withheld it because he had still hoped to bring Churchill to the conference table – and also to avert retaliation against German cities. Now he was driven to the calculation that only by an attack on London would ‘the English fighters leave their dens and be forced to give us open battle’, as the ace Adolf Galland put it.

Thus the Battle of Britain reached its climax: the assault by dense formations of Heinkel, Dornier and Junkers bombers protected by phalanxes of Messerschmitt 109s and 110s, against (Galland’s description) ‘the seven-million-people city on the Thames . . . brain and nerve centre of the British High Command’. It was an assault that had to brave a ring of 1500 barrage balloons, 2000 heavy and light anti-aircraft guns and the constantly maintained ranks of ‘the Few’, 750 Spitfires and Hurricanes. For ten days in mid-September, days of blue sky and brilliant sun remembered by all witnesses, the skies of south-eastern England were filled each morning by German raiders in hundreds proceeding towards London to be intercepted by British fighters rising to meet them and to disperse, sometimes to re-form, sometimes not, as the battle engulfed them. Desmond Flower, a young conscript of the Middlesex Regiment, recalls the spectacle:

Sunday in Sevenoaks was the same as Sunday throughout Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex. The hot summer air throbbed with the steady beat of the engines of bombers which one could not see in the dazzling blue. Then the RAF would arrive; the monotonous drone would be broken by the snarl of a fighter turning at speed, and the vapour trails would start to form in huge circles. I lay on my back in the rose garden and watched the trails forming; as they broadened and dispersed a fresh set would be superimposed upon them. Then, no bigger than a pin’s head, a white parachute would open and come down, growing slowly larger; I counted eight in the air at one time.

Some of the parachutes may have been British, for on 9, 11 and 14 September Fighter Command lost heavily in repelling the German formations. However, its success in sparing London damage – it was not true, as the German military attaché was reporting from Washington, that ‘the effect in the heart of London resembles an earthquake’ – now prompted the Luftwaffe to maximise its effort. On 15 September the largest bomber force yet dispatched, 200 aircraft with a heavy fighter escort, approached London. Fighter Command had early warning: its forward airfields had been repaired since the opening of the assault on the capital, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, gave permission for the Midlands Group, No. 12, to lend its squadrons to the defence. Visiting No. 11 Group’s headquarters at Uxbridge that morning, Churchill asked Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the group commander, ‘What other reserves have we?’, and got the answer he had heard from Gamelin in Paris three months before: ‘There are none.’ But Dowding’s plunge was a considered decision, not a miscalculation. It measured means against ends with discrimination, and the decision was justified by results. Some 250 Spitfires and Hurricanes intercepted the German bombers well east of London and by the end of the day when a second wave had been met and turned back, had shot down nearly sixty. It was the Luftwaffe’s most spectacular defeat in the battle (though not the costliest) and decisive in its deterrent effect. Hopes that Britain’s resistance could be broken while the invading season held collapsed: on 17 September Hitler announced the postponement of Operation Sealion until further notice.

Postponement of Sealion did not evoke a termination of Eagle. For one thing, Goering had always regarded the two operations as quite separate and clung to the hope that this personal offensive against Britain could achieve a strategic result independent of the efforts of the army and navy. For another, Hitler wished to sustain the pressure on Churchill’s government, which he had persuaded himself must perceive the inevitability of an accommodation as clearly he did himself. Daylight attacks on London and other targets were therefore maintained throughout September and on some days inflicted heavy damage; on 26 September, for example, a surprise raid on the Spitfire factory in Southampton stopped production for some time. The equation of aerial effort, however, was speaking for itself. As Galland explained to a resistant Goering at the Reichmarschall’s hunting lodge, whither Galland had been bidden to shoot a stag in reward for his fortieth victory, on 27 September, ‘British plane wastage was far lower and production far higher than the German intelligence staff estimated and now events were exposing the error so plainly that it had to be acknowledged.’

Acknowledgement was conceded slowly: daylight raids continued, at mounting cost, into October; but night raids – inaccurate though they were, besides inviting both retaliation and the accusation of ‘terror tactics’ which Hitler eschewed – began to become the norm. During October six times the tonnage of bombs was dropped by night as by day; and after November, in ‘the Blitz’ proper, night bombing supplanted daylight operations altogether. By then the Battle of Britain could be said to be over. It had been a heroic episode. ‘The Few’ deserved their epitaph: some 2500 young pilots had alone been responsible for preserving Britain from invasion. The majority were citizens; but significant numbers were Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans (including the icy ‘Sailor’ Malan, who tried to send German bomber pilots home with a dead crew, as a warning to the rest). A few were aliens, Irishmen and Americans, impatient at their countries’ neutrality, and a vital minority were refugees, Czechs and Poles; the latter, who formed 5 per cent of ‘the Few’, were responsible for 15 per cent of the losses claimed to have been inflicted on the Luftwaffe.

The victory of ‘the Few’ was narrow. During the critical months of August and September, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, Fighter Command lost 832 fighters, the Luftwaffe only 668. It was the loss of nearly 600 German bombers which made the balance sheet read so disfavourably to the attacker. Had Hitler and Goering been privy to the extent of their success during the height of the battle, when a quarter of Fighter Command’s pilots became casualties and fighter losses for a period (11 August to 7 September) exceeded production, they would undoubtedly have surpassed their effort. Had they done so, the Luftwaffe might then have made itself the first air force to achieve a decisive victory in combat as an independent strategic arm, thus fulfilling the vision that Douhet and Mitchell had glimpsed in the dawn of military aviation. As it was, the pragmatism of Dowding and his Fighter Command staff, the self-sacrifice of their pilots and the innovation of radar inflicted on Nazi Germany its first defeat. The legacy of that defeat would be long delayed in its effects; but the survival of an independent Britain which it assured was the event that most certainly determined the downfall of Hitler’s Germany.

Supply of food, of raw materials, of finished products, of weapons themselves, lies at the root of war. From the earliest times man has gone to war to take possession of resources he lacks and, when at war, has fought to secure his means of livelihood and self-protection from his enemy. The Second World War was no exception to this rule. In the view of Professor Alan Milward, principal economic historian of the conflict, its origins ‘lay in the deliberate choice of warfare as an instrument of policy by two of the world’s most economically developed states. Far from having economic reservations about warfare as a policy, both the German and Japanese governments were influenced in their decisions for war by the conviction that war might be an instrument of economic gain.’

Milward’s judgement that economic impulsion drove Japan to war is incontestable. It was Japan’s belief that her swelling population, overflowing an island homeland deficient in almost every resource, could be supported only by taking possession of the productive regions of neighbouring China which had brought her into direct diplomatic conflict with the United States in 1937-41; it was America’s reactive trade embargoes, designed to hamstring Japan’s strategic adventurism, that in 1941 drove the Tokyo government to choose war rather than circumscribed peace as its national way forward. In the year of Pearl Harbor 40 per cent of Japan’s requirements of steel had to be imported to the home islands, together with 60 per cent of her aluminium, 80 per cent of her oil, 85 per cent of her iron ore and 100 per cent of her nickel. America’s threat to deny her oil and metals, against a guarantee of good behaviour as Washington should judge it, was therefore tantamount to strangulation. The ‘southern offensive’ was an almost predictable outcome.

Hitler could not argue economic insufficiency to justify his strategic adventurism. In 1939, when a quarter of the population was still employed on the land, Germany was almost completely self-sufficient in food, needing to import only a proportion of her consumption of eggs, fruit, vegetables and fats. She also produced all the coal she consumed and a high proportion of her iron ore, except for armaments-grade ore which was supplied from Sweden. For rubber and oil – commodities for which coal-based substitutes would be found during the war – she was wholly dependent on imports, as she was also for most non-ferrous metals. However, through peaceful trade, her high level of exports (particularly of manufactures such as chemicals and machine tools) easily earned the surplus to fund and make good those deficiencies. Had it not been for Hitler’s social-Darwinian obsession with autarky – total national economic autonomy – Germany would have had no reason to prefer military to commercial intercourse with her neighbours.

Paradoxically it was Germany’s adversaries, Britain and France, and her half-hearted ally, Italy, which had the better economic reasons for going to war. Italy was a major energy importer, while her industry, particularly her war industry, was rooted in a tradition of craftsmanship quite inconsistent with the ruthless mass consumption of the modern battlefield. Italian aero-engines were works of art – no consolation to the
Regia Aeronautica
pilots when replacement aircraft failed to come off the production-line at a rate to match attrition in the skies over Malta and Benghazi. France, too, maintained military arsenals run on artisan principles; and, though the country fed itself with ease and exported luxuries in plenty, it depended on its empire and its trading partners for many raw materials and some manufactured goods – for advanced aircraft, for example, from the United States in the crisis of 1940, and for rubber from its colonies in Indo-China.

Britain’s case was the most paradoxical of all. In high gear, its industry could produce all the weapons, ships, aircraft, guns and tanks that its mobilised military population could man on the battlefield. As it had demonstrated in the First and events would prove in the Second World War, moreover, it could continue to find a surplus of armaments to export (to Russia) or to re-equip exile forces (Poles, Czechs, Free French), even at the nadir of its military fortunes. However, it could do so only by importing much of its non-ferrous metal and some of its machine-tool requirements to supply its factories, all its oil, and – most critically of all for an overpopulated island – half its food. At a pinch the Japanese, by living on unhusked rice, could survive at near-starvation level. The British, if deprived of North American wheat, would in the few months it would take to exhaust the national strategic reserve of flour and powdered milk have undergone a truly Malthusian decline and halved in numbers.

Hence Winston Churchill’s heartfelt admission, once victory came, that ‘the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. . . . It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.’ The most important statistics were easily set out. In 1939 Britain needed to import 55 million tons of goods by sea to support its way of life. To do so it maintained the largest merchant fleet in the world, comprising 3000 ocean-going vessels and 1000 large coastal ships of 21 million gross-register (total capacity) tons. Some 2500 ships were at sea at any one time: the manpower of the merchant service, a resource almost as important as the ships themselves, totalled 160,000. To protect this fleet the Royal Navy deployed 220 vessels equipped with Asdic – the echo-sounding equipment developed by the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee in 1917 – consisting of 165 destroyers, 35 sloops and corvettes and 20 trawlers. The ratio between merchant ships and escorts was thus about 14:1. Convoy, the practice of assembling merchant ships in organised formations under naval escort, was no longer a controversial procedure as it had been in the First World War; the Admiralty was committed to it before war broke out and it was introduced on the oceanic routes immediately and in coastal waters as soon as practicable.