With Wings Like Eagles (27 page)

Though it did not seem so at the time, August 25 was to prove a critical day of the Battle of Britain, a day that would show, in hindsight, just what a precarious undertaking war is, and how even small errors and events in warfare can have momentous and far-reaching historical consequences that are unimaginable at the time. On the night of August 24–25, German bombs had fallen on the City of London, the famous “square mile” of old London, its historical and financial center, which had not been bombed since the Gotha raids of 1918. As it happened, this was not intended as a German challenge to the British; it was due to a simple error in navigation on the part of bombers bent on destroying the oil storage facilities at Thameshaven. Also, it was against the orders of Göring, who had reserved the decision to bomb London to himself (though, in fact, he would not have done so without an order from the Führer, for whom it remained a political rather than a military matter). In any event, careless navigation by the bomber pilots of Sperrle’s
Luftflotte
3, rather than any change in policy at the top, decided the matter.

Churchill had no way of knowing this, however, and was outraged, though not surprised, and in no doubt that retaliation should take place immediately. This was neither easy to do, given the distance to Berlin and the very primitive navigational aids available to Bomber Command, nor anything the Air Staff wanted to do, since it would deflect them from nearer, and in their view, more important industrial targets, but nobody was prepared to argue the point with the prime minister. Churchill, whose threshold of patience with the Air Ministry was already very low, had anticipated these objections by asking how long it would take to prepare for a bombing raid on Berlin. He had been told that no more than twenty-four hours’ notice would be required, and on the night of the 24th, once bombs began to burst around the old Roman walls of the City of London, he therefore gave orders for the raid to be set in motion, weather permitting, for the night of August 25.

More than seventy-five twin-engine Wellingtons and Hampdens attacked “industrial targets” in Berlin that night, and these attacks were repeated on three of the next four nights (on one night the weather prevented a raid). There is no evidence that the British bombers managed to hit anything of consequence—given the standards of night navigation and bomb aiming of Bomber Command in 1940, they were fortunate to reach the right city—but ten civilians were killed, and on four nights Berliners heard the sounds of sirens and were told to take shelter.
*

This had a disproportionate effect on the Berliners, however—Göring had not only promised them that this
Luftwaffe
would ensure they would never be bombed, but had famously joked that if a single British bomb ever fell on Berlin “my name is Meyer.” They had believed him. Now the unthinkable had happened, and not a few Berliners guessed that these raids might be merely the start, and that more would soon be coming. Many of them had cheered and applauded when the
Luftwaffe
had devastated Warsaw and Rotterdam, events that were shown to the German public in triumphant newsreels, but nobody had seriously expected retribution, least of all the Führer himself. He had, from his point of view, made every effort to extend the hand of peace to the British, he had refrained from bombing London (there is no evidence that Sperrle had passed the unfortunate consequences of his pilots’ navigational mistakes back up the chain of command to Hitler), and apparently all he had gotten for his pains was the bombing of the Reich’s capital by the RAF. He seethed. The question of bombing London was no longer a matter of foreign policy, however woollily conceived; it had moved into the realm of the Nazis’ domestic policy—there was no way Hitler could fail to respond to the bombs falling on Berlin without running the risk of shaking the German people’s morale and, more important, their belief in him. Five days later he would meet with Göring, who was himself humiliated and shaken by the bombing of Berlin, and order him to begin the immediate bombing of London, and four days after that he would announce to a wildly cheering crowd at a rally at the Berlin Sportpalast, “Since they attack our cities, we will extirpate theirs!”

Thus, inadvertently, a major change in strategy was forced on the
Luftwaffe
. Though the British had no way of knowing it, the concentration on Fighter Command’s airfields and on the aviation industry, which was beginning to pay dividends, was about to be weakened by the beginning of large-scale “revenge attacks” on London. Even the
Luftwaffe
had only so many bombers, particularly once the Stukas had been removed from the front line, and there were certainly not enough of them to pursue two entirely different strategies at the same time.

Opinion on the wisdom of this change in plans was divided, although nobody in the
Luftwaffe
, least of all Göring, was about to question a decision of Hitler’s. Field Marshal Kesselring was in favor of bombing London, reasoning that this would force Fighter Command to put up its last remaining fighters, estimated now at less than 200, for defense, and thus give the German fighters a chance to destroy them. Field Marshal Sperrle was more pessimistic. He did not think that Fighter Command had been sufficiently weakened yet, and would have preferred to keep on attacking its airfields and the aviation industry. Besides, there were two serious problems in attacking London. First, although it was certainly an easy target, being then the largest and most populous city in the world (about 600 square miles and more than 8 million people), London’s very size made it difficult to destroy (unlike Warsaw and Rotterdam). In short, it could absorb a lot of punishment. Second, the German single-engine fighters would have at most ten minutes of combat time over London in which to defend the bombers if they were to make it back to their bases in France. The short range of the Bf 109 was, once again, a serious problem, to which there was no immediate solution.

In deciding to bomb London, and other British cities, the Germans, without giving the matter much thought, had stumbled across the same kind of question that was to face the Allies when, in 1942, they began to bomb Germany on a much larger scale: What level of destruction is necessary to break the will of a people? How many civilian deaths does it take to convince a people that a war is not worth fighting? Ironically, as matters turned out, the Germans themselves would eventually provide the answers to these questions—they continued to fight on even when their major cities were reduced to smoking rubble, and the only thing that would persuade them to surrender in the end was the death by his own hand of their Führer.

The destruction of Cologne by the RAF in 1942, the firestorm in Hamburg in 1943 that killed at least 50,000 people in one night, the wholesale destruction of Dresden in 1945—none of these was sufficient to break the German people’s will to resist, despite elaborate research on the subject by the many psychologists, zoologists, statisticians, economists, historians, and presumed experts on Germany who were consulted or put into uniform by the Allied air forces—indeed, it is possible that the bombing campaign against Germany may have had exactly the opposite effect to what was intended.

The Germans, by contrast, began their bombing campaign against British cities without having given any serious thought to what the effect would be, and without assembling teams of learned academics to tell the
Luftwaffe
what to bomb. Some Nazi leaders believed that bombing the West End of London—where wealthier Londoners lived and shopped—would break the will of the upper classes and persuade them to oust Churchill and his supporters and bring in a new government, perhaps including such old appeasers as Lloyd George, Lord Halifax, and the marquess of Londonderry, who were thought to be pro-German, or at least pro-peace. Others—including Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Germany’s odious, vain, arrogant former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, whose knowledge of Britain was taken seriously only by Hitler and dismissed by everybody else—favored bombing the East End of London, in the hope of stirring up social discontent among the working classes, the poor, and the Jewish population there and thus somehow—it was not clear how—bringing about the collapse of Churchill’s government. In the event, the East End would receive more bombs than the West End, in part because London’s docks and warehouses were there, representing an immense target of undeniable military significance; and in part because the East End was easier for the bombers to reach by flying up the Thames estuary and easier to identify from the air by night or day because of the unmistakable bend of the Thames. But on the whole Londoners of every class and religion did not panic, and far from demanding a change in government remained united behind the one they had. (That is not to suggest that everybody behaved like a hero, but instances of panic or cowardice were few and isolated—most people behaved stoically.)

The notion that bombing would bring Londoners into the streets en masse in fear and panic, or that social collapse and class warfare would bring the duke of Windsor back to the throne to replace his younger brother, or David Lloyd George, now aged, decrepit, and discredited, back to the front benches of the House of Commons to replace Churchill as prime minister, was a fantasy; but very few of Germany’s leaders had any personal experience of foreign countries, and Ribbentrop’s appointment as German ambassador in Britain (which had begun badly when he insisted on greeting the king with a Nazi salute and a shout of
“Heil Hitler!”
on presenting his credentials), together with his mistaken belief that he understood the British upper classes (and that they admired him), compounded by his snobbery and tunnel vision, had given him a false sense of expertise on British life and politics. Such ideas about Britain as he passed on to the Führer were largely delusional. Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and the other Nazi leaders, if they agreed on nothing else, detested Ribbentrop and paid no attention to his opinions. To be fair, Hitler was more realistic than his foreign minister—he listened to Ribbentrop, but somewhere at the back of his mind he now understood that the British would have to be confronted with a disaster before they gave in, whether it was bombing, an invasion, both, or something else.
*

August 25 was a day of patchy, cloudy weather, with relatively few German air raids during the day. At night, however, there were large raids, mostly concentrated on the industrial targets of the Midlands. Although Field Marshal Kesselring was using 200 as the number of fighters the British had left, in fact Dowding started the day with 233 Spitfires and 416 Hurricanes. He lost a total of sixteen aircraft and ten pilots during the day; the RAF claimed forty-seven German aircraft, but in fact shot down twenty. British and German losses were getting alarmingly close in numbers.

The next day the weather was better, and the
Luftwaffe
went back to its previous strategy, which was to send large raids of more than 100 aircraft by day against No. 11 Group’s major airfields, especially Kenley and Biggin Hill, and to raid widespread industrial targets by night. The Germans lost forty-one aircraft, but the British lost twenty-eight fighters, with four pilots and two air gunners killed or missing. This day, the 26th, also marked the beginning of a new British nighttime strategy. Dummy airfields were built near the real ones (they were known as “Q airfields” after the navy’s “Q ships,” merchantmen armed with concealed heavy cannon and naval crews, intended to act as lethal decoys for German surface raiders and submarines), with a flare path lit up at night, which tricked a good many Germans into dropping their bombs on open fields. This was comforting, but to the statisticians of Fighter Command the day-by-day rate of attrition of British fighters showed that Dowding’s reserves were being rapidly depleted—since August 10 the “wastage rate” of fighters was exceeding the number of new ones received, or of damaged ones repaired and returned. Here, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider what that meant. Dowding was never in danger of running out of fighters—on every day of the Battle of Britain he had at least as many fighters as the Germans did—but his reserves, representing the narrow margin of his superiority, were being reduced every day, and if losses continued at the same level would have been exhausted within three weeks. After that, Fighter Command would have been losing muscle, not fat. The lack of pilots was still the more critical factor, and the harder to deal with.

Haze and bad weather on the 27th led to a quiet day, so far as German attacks were concerned. But perhaps taking advantage of the momentary lull, Park unleashed, at last, an open though indirect attack on Leigh-Mallory. Park did this in a new set of instructions to his ground controllers,
⁷
expressing his satisfaction with the support he had received from No. 10 Group in protecting his airfields when his squadrons were fully engaged against the enemy, and contrasting that with No. 12 Group’s apparent lack of interest. He pointed out that on at least two occasions when he had requested assistance from No. 12 Group in protecting his airfields, the aircraft never showed up, either because it took them too long to form up into big wings or because they were hunting for glory and easy pickings elsewhere over No. 11 Group’s area instead of obeying his controllers’ instructions. In the spirit of a man anxious to wash his hands of the whole business, he instructed his ground controllers to contact Fighter Command headquarters directly from now on in these circumstances, rather than deal with No. 12 Group’s controller. In other words, he bumped the problem of Leigh-Mallory’s lack of team spirit up to Dowding himself. It would be up to Fighter Command to order Leigh-Mallory to protect Park’s airfields.

Park did not dwell on the “big wing” controversy—although that thorny subject would soon come to dominate the dispute between the two groups, and also between Leigh-Mallory and Dowding. But nobody reading Park’s instructions to his controllers could have been in any doubt about his opinion or his anger, and news of the instructions soon spread in Fighter Command. Most of Park’s airfields were too close to the coast to permit him the luxury of forming big wings, even if he had wanted to. The time it took for enemy aircraft to reach their targets in No. 11 Group was so short that Park was lucky when he could get one or two squadrons up to attack them, never mind having them “stooge about” in the sky trying to form a big wing. Being farther north, Leigh-Mallory had slightly more time to allow his squadrons to experiment with this tactic, but even then, Park thought it was a mistake, and events would subsequently prove that he knew what he was talking about. In the meantime, Leigh-Mallory’s pilots raged at Park’s implied criticism of them, and Bader in particular insisted on the merits of the big wing—an argument that by now had made its way up to the highest level at Air Ministry, where Dowding had few friends or admirers.