The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The Führer preferred a settlement, freeing the Wehrmacht from the need to defend a Western Front when he attacked his mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Though he despised Churchill, he admired the British Empire; its existence, he believed, was essential to world order. (All SS officers were required to watch the film Gunga Din; that, he told them, was the way a superior race should treat its inferiors.) Therefore he was prepared to offer England a generous treaty. Convinced that they must realize the hopelessness of their situation, he dismissed Churchill’s defiance as bluff and expected the British to come to him. After four weeks of waiting, on July 19 he made his move in a Reichstag speech. After insulting Churchill—“I feel a deep disgust for this type of unscrupulous politician who wrecks whole nations”—he said of himself, “I am not the vanquished begging favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.” He promised Britons that absent a settlement, “great suffering will begin.” Speaking directly to Churchill, he said, “Believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed—an empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm.” Hinting at liberal terms, he concluded dramatically, “I can see no reason why this war must go on.”178

  The answer came within the hour. Churchill did not deign to comment on the offer—“I do not propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech,” he said, “not being on speaking terms with him”—but a BBC broadcaster, later supported by the foreign office, addressed the Führer directly: “Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reich Chancellor, we hurl it right back into your evil-smelling teeth!”179

  In Rome the diarist Count Galeazzo Ciano noted that “a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spreads among the Germans.” Actually Berlin was astounded, and Hitler nonplussed. The German General Staff had always assumed that Britain could be defeated only by cutting its sea routes. Although all great powers spend peacetime preparing contingency plans for war against other countries, including their closest allies, the German army did not draft preliminary plans for an offensive against England until June 1937, and the Luftwaffe did not follow through with similar memoranda until 1938.180

  And these were merely paper exercises. As A. J. P. Taylor has pointed out, Hitler had foreign policy ambitions but no war plans at all; he was, in the words of the historian and novelist Len Deighton, “one of the most successful opportunists of the twentieth century,” making it up as he went along. Indeed, it is an astonishing fact—the military historian Basil Liddell Hart calls it “one of the most extraordinary features of history”—that neither the Führer nor his General Staff in Zossen had studied or even contemplated the problems arising from Britain’s continued belligerency. They hadn’t done it when war broke out; it was still undone nine months later, when the French capitulated. They had worked out elaborate strategies for seizing every European country, including Spain, the Balkans, and their Italian ally; they had drawn up orders of battle for Scandinavia and the Soviet Union; they even knew how, if it became necessary, to overwhelm the Vatican. The German naval war staff, knowing the Kriegsmarine would be charged with ferrying German troops to England if the orders came down, had studied the problem in desultory fashion since the previous autumn. The army and Luftwaffe had not. On May 27 the naval war staff had drafted a vague Studie England, but in all the banks of steel files in Zossen, there was not so much as a single memorandum on the question of how the greatest army the world had ever known could subjugate Great Britain.181

  To reach England the Wehrmacht had to cross the Channel or the North Sea. Hitler hated the idea. “On land I am a hero but on water I am a coward,” he told Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt. Since Nazi Germany had no landing craft and no plans to build any, German troops, if they went to England, would do so aboard river barges. The barges were intended for river traffic; flat-bottomed, 90 feet long, 20 feet wide, with a top speed of 7 miles per hour, they were not built for seagoing excursions. Some operated under their own power, many were towed. Not a single unit in the German army had been trained in the skills of amphibious warfare. The Continent and contiguous lands were the only world the Generalstab knew. That world ended at its edge, the western coast of France. Paris had been the objective of the Nazis’ great spring offensive, to the exclusion of all else, the last step before the invasion of Russia.182

  In England the Royal Navy was the Senior Service. The War Office deferred to the Admiralty, the oldest of England’s war ministries, founded during the reign of Henry VIII. Officers in the British army were respected and often distinguished, though army commands scattered throughout the empire depended upon the navy for supply and reinforcements. The various far-flung components of the British Empire were tethered together, nurtured, and protected by the Royal Navy. Cruisers and destroyers at Gibraltar protected the western end of the Mediterranean, while the fleet at Alexandria did likewise for the central and eastern Mediterranean. The Home Fleet, from its main anchorage at Scapa Flow, almost five hundred miles north of London, in far northern Scotland, had been charged by the Admiralty with protecting Atlantic merchant shipping and, most important, protecting the Home Island much as escort squadrons protect an aircraft carrier. Destroyers would play a key role in contesting a German invasion. The British began the war with more than eighty destroyers available for deployment in the North Sea and around the Home Island, and a dozen or more for North Atlantic operations. They were fast, could weave and shoot their way through an invasion armada at speeds of thirty-five miles an hour, and were vital to the blockade of Germany and to Britain’s survival. But since January, two dozen had been sunk by U-boats, German mines, and the Luftwaffe. The registry of Royal Navy destroyers might have been larger but for the Chamberlain government’s decision in 1938 to stop constructing ships, as a means to economize. That was why Churchill sought destroyers from Roosevelt.

  By the end of June, the Home Fleet had stationed forty destroyers, several cruisers, and two battle cruisers in ports ranging from Aberdeen and Rosyth in Scotland, to Hull and Yarmouth down the coast, to Dover and Ramsgate in the southeast of England. In the south and southwest, warships were stationed in Portsmouth, Portland, Plymouth, Falmouth, Cardiff, and Swansea. The big ships were supported by more than 900 anti-submarine trawlers, gunboats, minesweepers, motor torpedo boats, minelayers, anti-aircraft ships, and cutters. Almost 200 corvettes—1,000-ton, 200-foot-long gunboats that carried depth charges—were available to escort Atlantic convoys into home waters or, if need be, to help repel an invasion. Three aircraft carriers were available for island defense; the Germans had no carriers. The Royal Navy would charge into the Channel if the Germans came, and do so under the protective fire of 150 six-inch naval guns sited on bluffs along the Channel coast. Except for submarines, the portion of the Home Fleet that remained at Scapa Flow—a “fleet in being”—was larger than the entire German navy. Of Hitler’s eighty U-boats, the fifty assigned to the blockade of Britain posed a mortal threat, but only if they kept up the hunt for British merchant shipping on the high seas and the Northwest Approaches to Britain’s ports. Churchill expected Hitler to throw a dozen or two of his U-boats into the invasion. Even if they were to inflict pain on British warships, the Royal Navy and any surviving RAF fighters and bombers would hunt them to extinction in the narrow Channel. Hence Churchill’s confidence in his navy. Britannia still ruled the waves, and Hitler had to ride them to get to England.

  Germany had lost its few colonies in 1918, and with them the imperative for a worldwide navy. Except for U-boat commanders—feared and respected by the British, glorified in Germany—German military glory was reserved for German soldiers, and if Göring had his way, German airmen. German naval officers were considered social inferiors in Germany; they lacked the self-assurance essential to military aggression. Thus, when the Führer issued the first reluctant order to “prepare a landing operation against England and if necessary carry it out,” and assigne
d the task of ferrying the Wehrmacht across the Channel to his admirals on the Bendlerstrasse, the response there was neither confident nor ardent, and for sound reasons. Unless the Luftwaffe hobbled the British Home Fleet along with British fighter planes and British bombers, any success in the daytime skies over southern England would be offset when the Royal Navy sailed forth—at night, as the invaders came on—to thwart the seaborne invasion.183

  Destroying British ships was critical, and the British had a great many ships. The Germans had no large warships outside the Baltic (and had only four inside the Baltic) to counter the overwhelmingly superior numbers of Royal Navy destroyers and larger capital ships (cruisers, battle cruisers, and battleships). The German navy had begun the war with only twenty-one destroyers and had paid dearly for its April success in Norway, where ten destroyers were sunk or scuttled. Thus, when the subject of supporting an invasion of England was raised, the commander in chief of the German navy, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, submitted a confidential report to the Führer listing his objections to an invasion. Raeder concluded: “The C. in C., Navy cannot for his part advocate an invasion of Britain as he did in the case of Norway.”184

  The other German services were also wary. The Luftwaffe high command concluded that “a combined operation with a landing as its object must be rejected,” and Zossen curtly sent a memo that the army “is not concerning itself with the question of England. Considers execution impossible… General Staff rejects the operation.” Nevertheless, Hitler persisted, as only he could, and in mid-July Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the army’s high command, drew up plans for an operation encoded Seelöwe, or Sea Lion. It was an ambitious strategy, envisioning the landing of 90,000 troops in the first wave. By the third day, 160,000 reinforcements would be landed, to be followed by forty-one divisions, six of them panzers and two airborne. Each force had a specific objective; one would block off Devon and Cornwall, for example, while another cut off Wales. OKH opinion, swayed by Hitler’s iron will, reversed itself. The generals now expected the operation to last less than a month. In fact, they thought it would be easy.185

  But the Führer’s naval staff was appalled by Seelöwe, for many of the same reasons Churchill was encouraged. Just putting the first wave ashore on so wide a front would require 1,722 barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs, and 155 transports. Raeder protested that this was self-evidently impossible; naval protection for so vast an armada, even if it could be assembled, would expose every warship and merchant ship the Reich possessed to the gunners of the Royal Navy. He proposed a landing on a much narrower front between Folkestone and Eastbourne with fewer troops, thus minimizing the risk to his fleet. The General Staff rejected that. In such an operation, Zossen argued, the German soldiers might be overwhelmed by defenders.

  Actually, there was no need to reconcile differences between the Nazi services. Churchill had been right at Briare. The decisive moment—an air assault on England—was yet to come. The enemy could not try to ferry the Channel until his warplanes were absolute masters of the daytime skies over Britain. OKW realized it. In a paper for the Führer, “Die Weiterführung des Krieges gegen England” (“The Continuation of the War Against England”), Jodl noted that administering the deathblow, a landing on British shores, could “only be contemplated after Germany has achieved control of the air.”186

  Before Hitler could invade England, he must first destroy the Royal Air Force and hobble the Royal Navy. Hermann Göring declared that the Luftwaffe had changed its mind; they could do it, he said, and do it easily.

  In christening what would come to be known as the Battle of Britain, Churchill envisioned a mighty struggle on the beaches between infantrymen, masterminded by admirals and generals and supported by armor and sea power. Scarcely anyone gave thought to the challenges of aerial warfare. Professional airmen were an exception, of course, but all they knew for certain was that the aerial combat of 1914–1918—the duels between individuals piloting wood and fabric biplanes while listening to the wind in the wires—had been rendered obsolete by advancing technology. Clearly future combat would be far more complex. However, the most influential of their leaders between the wars—Giulio Douhet in Rome, Lord Trenchard in London, Billy Mitchell in Washington, and Hermann Göring in Berlin—had made the wrong assumption. They believed that victory would belong to the air forces which launched the fastest, most powerful bombing offensives. Thus the Luftwaffe had leveled Spanish cities, the Italians Ethiopian villages, the Japanese Chinese cities. There was, air ministries told their governments, no defense against a knockout bombardment from the sky.

  Stanley Baldwin was speaking for them in November 1932 when, endorsing unilateral disarmament, he told Parliament that there was no defense against “the terror of the air.” In an uncharacteristically emotional speech, he had warned the House of Commons, and hence the country: “I think it well… for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”

  That dogma still held after the fall of France. Even Churchill believed that victory lay through offensive airpower. On July 8, he told Beaverbrook that the “one sure path” to victory lay in “bombing Germany into submission.” It was understood that the targets would be military. Baldwin’s terrible thesis of killing women and children aside, the war planners took aim at arms factories, power plants, steel mills, rail yards, and the like, not residential neighborhoods.187

  Airpower had been crucial in the defeat of Poland, but after the fall of Warsaw, little thought had been given to ways of countering it. During the phony war, RAF strategists, following the dogma Douhet had set forth in his futuristic book, The War of 19—, had proposed sending fleets of bombers against industrial targets in the Ruhr. To their chagrin, His Majesty’s Government vetoed unprovoked daylight raids. Dropping propaganda leaflets over the Reich that promised destruction to Germans on the ground was approved, but even this went badly; none of the raiders found their targets, and the bombers, unescorted by fighters, suffered such heavy losses that the project was abandoned. On the night of May 16, with General Guderian’s panzers beyond Sedan, the British had sent one hundred bombers to pound industrial targets in the Ruhr. The RAF official history acknowledges that the bombardiers “achieved none of their objects.” The crews, unable to find a single target, had jettisoned their bomb loads and returned to England having accomplished nothing. That should have given the air marshals pause. It didn’t; in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, they continued to believe that “bombing unsupported by land and sea forces could win a war.”188

  Little thought had been given to providing bombers with fighter escorts, and for a valid reason: Both British and German fighter planes lacked the range to escort their bombers on the 1,000-mile round-trip journey to the other’s homeland. British and German fighter planes had a maximum range of between 300 and 400 miles—150 miles out, 150 miles home. They could remain in the air for about 90 minutes and could not reach the other side’s borders, let alone linger there in support of bombers. Nobody in Bomber Command had considered the possibility that Germany would defeat France and Belgium, capture their airfields—some just 100 miles from London—and park fleets of bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter planes on them. Although the senior ranks of the RAF were convinced in the late 1930s that Bomber Command was the key to victory, and that, by implication, fighter aircraft and other defenses had marginal roles to play, their faith in air offensives was not without heretics. In 1937 a cabinet minister, Sir Thomas Inskip, facing the hard fact that Nazi Germany was winning the bomber race, argued that it really didn’t matter. “The object of our Air Force,” he said, “is not an early knock-out blow but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.” The RAF, in other words, didn’t have to win; it merely had to avoid defeat. For that, the RAF needed fighte
r planes. The Air Ministry, appalled at this heresy, vehemently disagreed, but HMG accepted Inskip’s recommendation, and it was Britain’s good luck that the senior member of the Air Council agreed with it.

  He was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. In retrospect, “Stuffy” Dowding—as anointed by his fliers—is seen as the true hero of the Battle of Britain, though his contemporaries were slow to realize it. One reason lay in the nature of the man. He was a difficult man to like. Ever since Trafalgar, Britons had expected their military heroes to be Nelsons, and Dowding was far from that. Tall, frail, and abstemious, he was a bird-watching widower whose career had suffered from tactlessness, unorthodox views, and a remarkable lack of social graces. That he dabbled in spiritualism and was a vegetarian only augmented the perception of his flyboys that he was a strange duck. In the mid-1930s, his seniority—during the first war he had been ten years older than Germany’s air ace von Richthofen—entitled him to the RAF’s highest post, chief of air staff, but his fellow marshals denied him it. Instead they sidelined him, or so they thought, as head of Fighter Command. If the war was going to be won by aerial bombardment, the only outcome they foresaw, there would be little glory for fighters.189