The Battle of Britain Read online

  The other German aircraft used extensively in the battle were less effective. The second fighter employed was the Messerschmitt Me 110C/110D twin-engined heavy fighter. It could fly further than the Me 109, and had a comparable speed of 336 mph at 19,000 feet, but it proved much less manoeuvrable than the smaller fighters, and its range was much less than expected under combat conditions. The Me 110’s purpose was to lure enemy fighters into battle, allowing the bombers that followed them to fly on to their targets unmolested. In the event the Me 110 had itself to be protected by the Me 109 to prevent insupportable losses. When the Me 110 flew beyond single-seater fighter range, it proved a sitting duck. The British thought that the German Air Force flew a third fighter, the Heinkel He 113, but it proved to be a figment of the imagination. The only aircraft with this designation was a twin-seat dive-bomber developed in 1936, but the model was renumbered the He 118 by its designer because Heinkel feared pilot superstition. The aircraft remained jinxed none the less; when Udet test-flew it himself in June 1936, it broke up in mid-air and he narrowly escaped with his life. The He 118 never saw service. Its mistaken identification in the battle has been attributed to German misinformation.

  German bomber aircraft were generally no match for the RAF. The Junkers Ju 87B dive-bomber suffered the same fate as the Me 110. Much slower than the heavy fighter, it was highly vulnerable during bomb attack and was withdrawn early in the battle. The standard twin-engined bombers, the Heinkel 111 and Dornier 17, were early designs and faced obsolescence by 1940. They were slow and poorly armed for combat with high-class fighters; they carried a small bomb-load (around 2,000 pounds maximum), which they could deliver with at least a limited accuracy thanks to a system of radio navigational beams. The newest German bomber, the Junkers Ju 88A-1, could fly further, had a higher speed, and in a dive could not only bomb with greater accuracy, but could outrun a Spitfire. It was produced in small numbers in 1940, and the maximum bomb-load was only 4,000 pounds, about one-fifth of the load carried later in the war by the Avro Lancaster used in the bombing of Germany. Like all German bombers, its defensive armament was weak, and even its extra speed brought it no immunity during daylight operations against the more manoeuvrable and heavily armed British fighters.

  The German Air Force also possessed a large complement of highly qualified air crew, with extensive combat experience. Although the single-engined fighter force had fewer pilots than Fighter Command, they survived longer and had a higher rate of operational readiness.33 Most of the pilots who began the air battle had been trained well before the outbreak of war, though night-flying technique was neglected until the summer of 1940. The average age of German pilots captured in June and July was twenty-six; their average length of service was almost five years.34 The pilots who engaged in the battle represented the cream of the German Air Force. The training system in 1940 was reformed, like the British system, to try to speed up the throughput of pilots, but standards of training were rigorous. Even if Udet had succeeded in conjuring more aircraft out of German factories, the air force would still have had difficulty supplying the men to fly them.

  The task the German Air Force was called on to perform resembled, at least superficially, the opening days of the campaigns against Poland and France when the enemy air force was swiftly neutralized by concentrated bomber and dive-bomber attacks on airfields and support services. A German radio broadcast in early August explained the similarity: ‘the main weapon is the bomb. German bombers will be employed with concentrated effect and in continuous waves. The effect obtained by them has already been shown in such towns as Warsaw, Rotterdam…’35 German Air Force records suggest, however, that the fighter was regarded as the principal weapon. The object of the air campaign was to wipe out Fighter Command, using the bombers as bait. ‘Whether the objectives were convoys in the Channel,’ ran a post-war interrogation of German air leaders, ‘or airfields inland, or London, the object was always the same – to bring the defending squadrons to battle to weaken them.’36

  There was in truth a certain confusion in the instructions issued to the German Air Force in July and early August. On 11 July the three air fleets were issued with an operational directive to begin ‘intensive air warfare against England’, and on 17 July they were ordered to full readiness. Probing attacks began against ports and shipping on the basis of instructions issued earlier in May, but still current, for blockade attacks on British imports. Yet another directive, issued on 16 July for Operation Sealion, ordered further preparations for invasion. Air fleets were expected to attack coastal defences, enemy troop concentrations and reserves, key communication targets and naval installations. The only object they were not yet ordered to destroy was the enemy air force, whose elimination was supposed to be the primary pre-condition for launching an invasion at all. Only in late July did the air force commanders present to Goering their plans for winning air superiority, and not until 1 August did Hitler issue a further directive requiring the air force ‘to overpower the English air force… in the shortest possible time’ through attacks on the whole air force structure and its supporting industries. Once ‘local or temporary air superiority’ was gained, the air force was then expected, without explanation, to switch back to the blockade role it had started with. The knock-out blow against the RAF was set to begin on or shortly after 5 August.37

  This plethora of orders reflected the deeper uncertainties about the conduct of the war at the highest level. The air force was much clearer in its own mind about the primary objective, and confident of achieving it. On 6 August at Carinhall, his sumptuous country estate outside Berlin, Goering had a final meeting with Kesselring, Sperrle and the commander of Air Fleet 5, General Hans Stumpff. The operational plan they adopted was straightforward: in four days Fighter Command would be destroyed over southern England. The plan was then to move forward systematically sector by sector, destroying military and economic targets up to a line from King’s Lynn to Leicester, until daylight attacks could finally be extended at will over the whole of the British Isles. The initial aim was to send over small forces of bombers with a light escort, leaving the fighter force free to hunt out and destroy enemy fighters. The day for the start of the attack was codenamed Adlertag, day of the eagles.38

  The precise date for the start of the campaign was more difficult to fix, since success depended critically on a spell of good weather. In Berlin the popular mood worsened at the weeks of apparent inactivity, even when skies were clear. ‘Wonderful weather,’ Goebbels noted acidly. ‘Too good for our air force.’ He detected a certain nervousness in the public: ‘The people fear that we have missed the right moment.’ But in Hitler he observed a real hesitancy to take ‘a damn difficult decision’.39 The date for attack was finally fixed for 10 August, but bad weather over southern England forced postponement, first to the following day, then to the morning of 13 August. The tension deepened as each day the weather intervened. ‘People wait and wait for the great attack,’ Goebbels noted for 12 August.40 The following day the weather was indifferent, and attacks were postponed again until the afternoon. By chance, news of the postponement arrived too late for hundreds of aircraft already airborne. They pressed on under poor flying conditions to launch, at only part strength, the long-expected assault. Adlertag began not with a bang, but with a whimper.

  THE BATTLE

  The strength of the British fighter defence, on which the German daylight attacks and the hopes of the coveted mastery of the air had come to grief, had perhaps been under-rated… The enemy’s power of resistance was stronger than the medium of attack.

  OTTO BECHTLE, LECTURE IN BERLIN, FEBRUARY 19441

  Most battles have a clear shape to them. They start on a particular day, they are fought on a geographically defined ground, they end at a recognizable moment, usually with the defeat of one protagonist or the other. None of these things can be said of the Battle of Britain. There is little agreement about when it started; its geographical range constantly shifted; it ended as un
tidily as it began. Neither air force was defeated in any absolute sense.

  Uncertainty about when the battle started reflects the nature of the air war fought in 1940. Minor bomb attacks began on Britain on the night of 5/6 June, and small-scale, spasmodic raids continued throughout the rest of June and July. The intensification of the air assault in the second week of August prompted the Air Ministry later to assign 8 August as the start of what came to be called the Battle of Britain. When Dowding wrote his ‘Despatch’ in August 1941, he was reluctant to impose a neat chronology because operations ‘merged into one another almost insensibly’. He rejected 8 August and suggested as the starting point 10 July, the date of the onset of heavier attacks along the Channel coast.2 For the German side 13 August was supposed to be the day the battle for air supremacy commenced, but the attacks on that day, though larger in scale, were not regarded on the British side as a distinctive change. Air signals intelligence simply reported: ‘Activity has been above normal in the past 24 hours.’3 Even allowing for British understatement, there was little to distinguish the first days of the German assault from the previous weeks of air attack. Air Vice-Marshal Park, whose 11 Group held the front line, observed a sharp change only on 18 August, when major attacks began on fighter airfields. There may be a good case for seeing this date as the start of the decisive phase of the battle, but air fighting in defence of Britain was continuous from June onwards.

  If there is no agreed date for the start of the battle, its geographical limits are also ill-defined. That this should be so does not just reflect the reality of fighting in the third dimension. German orders called for probing attacks across the British Isles against air, naval and economic targets. The attacks on 27/8 June, to take one example, were made against widely scattered cities and towns, including Liverpool, Newcastle, Scunthorpe, Southampton, Harwich and Farnborough.4 One factor above all, however, created the elastic geography of the battle: throughout its course other RAF commands, the Royal Navy and the German Navy engaged in offensive operations of their own far from the air battle over southern England. These operations were intimately related to the battle. The German Navy was engaged in blockading Britain as a contribution to the effort to reduce British supplies and to encourage defeatism among the British people. The other RAF commands were employed against the threat of invasion.

  The contribution of Coastal Command to the battle is all too easy to neglect. Yet the Command was given a difficult and costly responsibility. From June it mounted an anti-invasion patrol to provide intelligence on German preparations, and occasionally to engage in bomb attacks against German shipping and stores. Patrols were mounted over all German-controlled ports twice every twenty-four hours; there was continuous reconnaissance of the ports from the Hook of Holland to Ostend during the hours of darkness in case the enemy launched a surprise cross-Channel attack under cover of night. The cost was very high. Over a six-month period the Command lost 158 aircraft and 600 men from an operational strength in August 1940 of only 470 mainly obsolete aeroplanes.5

  RAF Bomber Command was assigned an important complementary task. During the 1930s it had been assumed that in the event of all-out air war with Germany, Bomber Command would hit back in kind to deter further German attacks. Not until 15 May, following the German bombing attack on Rotterdam, was the Command given formal permission to begin operations against German territory. Its contribution was small. Poorly armed with medium bombers of limited range, Bomber Command found that the attack by day produced unacceptable, almost suicidal rates of attrition. Attacks were soon switched to night-time, and during June and July bombing of the north German coast and the Ruhr area was carried out to try to tie down the German Air Force and weaken its economic base. In July the Air Ministry developed the idea that the Striking Force, as it was known conventionally, if not entirely appropriately, should wear down German resistance ‘by carefully planned bombardments of vital objectives’. If Fighter Command was the defensive guard, Bomber Command would supply ‘a straight left’.6

  If such a view was at least consistent with the familiar air force metaphor of the knock-out blow, it was utterly beyond Bomber Command’s capacity or means in 1940. The directive issued on 4 July, and subsequently modified on 13, 24 and 30 July, required the bomber force to attack invasion targets in ports on the Channel coast, but also to attack a list of industrial targets regarded as decisive – aircraft production, oil, communications (power supply was added on 30 July) – and, when short of other activity, to drop incendiary pellets on flammable stretches of German forest and grainland.7 Bomber attacks on the invasion ports, where barges and small vessels were concentrated, were carried out with modest success. The assault on German industry, power systems and communications was impossible to achieve with existing technology, even if the Command had possessed adequate numbers of aircraft and sufficient pilots. During early August, however, Bomber Command suffered a greater deficiency of pilots than Fighter Command, and experienced heavy losses from operations and accidents.8 German leaders could detect no pattern to the isolated and inaccurate attacks mounted by British bombers, and assumed that British intentions were simply to terrorize the German population.

  The one field of battle where British preparations proved at least equal to the task in 1940 was fighter defence, and it was for that reason alone that German air fleets concentrated their efforts on destroying Fighter Command. If Dowding’s force had been as poorly armed and prepared as either Coastal or Bomber Command, the consequences for the future would have been far bleaker. The first phase of the air battle, in June and July, was used by the German Air Force to probe that defensive shield to see just how brittle it was. German operations took the form of regular armed reconnaissance combined with short hit-and-run attacks against widely scattered objectives by day and by night. Small numbers of bombers or dive-bombers were used, loosely protected by larger fighter screens intent on wearing down Fighter Command when the RAF flew up to engage the bombers. German targets lay mainly along the coast by day, but at night they roamed over much of Britain, bringing the bombing war to remote communities long before the Blitz, whose scale and intensity has blotted out proper recollection of the first stage of the bombing war. On 31 July, for example, bombs fell in south-east Cornwall, Somerset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Shropshire and South Wales, where Monmouth station was attacked, but little damaged.9

  British authorities were every bit as puzzled by these attacks as the Germans were by those of Bomber Command. German air fleets sustained regular attrition throughout the weeks of probing attacks, and achieved little serious destruction or loss of life either on the ground or against Fighter Command. The attacks certainly supplied German airmen with the opportunity to train in night-flying techniques, but they equally gave the British fighter and anti-aircraft defences weeks of precious preparation and practice, and afforded a valuable assessment of German air tactics. This learning-curve was principally of value to the defender. German fighter aircraft had developed tactics in attack that gave them the edge in combat. Flying in loose pairs, with one aircraft protecting the one in front, German fighters could fight more flexibly than the RAF, which kept fighters in tight formations of three. This tactic required a great deal of effort from the two wing aircraft to keep station with the one in the centre, and reduced the defensive assistance each could supply to the others. Such a formation was even more vulnerable if aircraft could not be alerted and sent airborne in time to get level with, or above, the enemy.

  The July attacks gave Fighter Command time to iron out the teething troubles in the system of communication and to ensure that squadrons were airborne quickly and deployed economically. Gradually Fighter Command adopted the tactics of more flexible flying, and loss rates were stabilized. The probing attacks also gave the defence practice in responding to a number of different threats simultaneously, and convinced Park at 11 Group that fighters should be deployed in small formations in case attacks were mere feints, or might be followed by successiv
e waves of aircraft. Park’s policy conserved his force, though it often pitted squadrons against much larger formations of the enemy waiting on the chance to engage RAF fighters on unequal terms in large pitch battles.

  What the German Air Force learned was less encouraging. German commanders hoped that bombers could be left to make their own way to targets with a loose fighter escort, which would be free to fly off to engage enemy fighters. Fighter Command, on the other hand, was obliged to fight the bombers first, as they represented the primary destructive threat. Gradually German fighters found themselves tied more closely to the bombers. The two forces, bombers and fighters, would rendezvous over the Channel and fly together, fighters slightly to the rear and from 5,000 to 10,000 feet above the bomber formations. By September German fighters were forced to fly in the front and on the flanks of the bombers to give them proper convoy protection. This tactic proved a two-edged sword, for it compelled German fighters to stick with the bombers and reduced the combat flexibility that was the distinctive strength of the German fighter arm.

  It was perhaps with a sense of relief that the German Air Force finally received Goering’s order to destroy Fighter Command in four days of intensive attacks in the middle of August. Bad weather interfered not only on Adlertag but on several subsequent days, so that the decisive shift in German strategy was obscured from the British side. Fighter Command did observe an increase in activity against radar installations from 8 August, and on fighter stations near the coast. But only by 18 August did the attack manifestly increase in intensity and move further inland against the entire structure of the fighter force.10 Two days later, with aircraft grounded again by poor weather, Goering issued a directive to the German air fleet commanders to finish off Fighter Command with ‘ceaseless attacks’ by day and by night, in time for a landing in Kent and Sussex now scheduled for 15 September.11