The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Ignoring them and their strategy, Dowding pursued his own goals with quiet tenacity. In his headquarters in Bentley Priory, an eighteenth-century Gothic mansion outside London, he organized Britain’s anti-aircraft defenses, inspected the balloon barrage that would encircle London when war came, presided over the RAF’s change from biplane fighters to metal monoplanes powered by the Rolls-Royce V-12 Merlin engines, pressed for all-weather runways at fighter fields, and took the first, historic steps toward military use of Radio Direction Finding (RDF), or radar, as the Americans later called it.

  By July 1940, Dowding had about eight hundred operational Spitfire and Hurricane single-engine fighter planes. He arrayed them in four groups—two frontline and two in reserve. In reserve were No. 10 Group in the southwest of England, and No. 13 in northern England and Scotland. Six hundred Hurricanes and Spitfires went to the frontline groups, No. 12 in the midlands, and No. 11 Group north and south of London, roughly from Ipswich to the Isle of Wright, and most predominantly on the Kent promontory. This was the sector the German invasion barges would most likely target, either north of the Thames estuary, or on the south coast, just west of Dover, or in both places. Therefore, it was the sector Göring targeted. No. 11 Group had to be destroyed before an invasion could be launched, for No. 11 Group served as the shield over southeast England.

  But radar was destined to be England’s greatest shield in the critical months ahead. Dowding had been one of its champions from the beginning. Before his promotion to Fighter Command, he had commanded RAF research and development, and while there, he had studied the RDF experiments of Robert Watson Watt, a scientist at the National Physical Laboratory. Watson Watt convinced Dowding and those around him that airplanes could reflect radio beams. Yet in his push for radar, conducted with utmost civility and professional aplomb, Dowding had put himself on the wrong side of Churchill’s good friend the Prof, Frederick Lindemann. For this, Dowding would later pay. Meanwhile, the Nazis knew something about radar technology but had entrusted development of it to their navy, seeing it as a reconnaissance device, and there it had languished.

  Even before the war, Dowding had believed that radar could become a priceless defensive weapon. In 1937 he had ordered work begun along the country’s eastern and southern coasts on a chain of coastal RDF stations, a mix of low-level stations, with an effective range of about 50 miles, and high-level, with a range of about 120 miles. By the spring of 1940, Britain possessed a mesh of radio beams comprising, as one Englishmen later called it, an “invisible bastion” against hostile aircraft. Thankfully for the British, Hitler had prohibited spending on any technological research that he believed would not contribute to his objective of a swift victory; radar was one such technology. In July 1940, German technicians were not even sure of the purpose of all those tall towers along the British coast, although many suspected that they were radar towers. Thus, the Luftwaffe began its campaign with an imperfect, at best, understanding of the towers.

  Fifty radar stations scanned the skies from northern Scotland on around the Home Island to Wales. Most were located in the east and southeast, facing the North Sea and the English Channel, just twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. The outgoing radio signal was sent from wires fixed between two 360-foot towers; the return signal reached twin fixed receivers perched on 240-foot towers. In wooden sheds beneath the towers, technicians studying monitors would phone details on the range, direction, and size of advancing Nazi forces to the central operations room at Bentley Priory, where blue-shirted members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) plotted their progress on a huge table map, using croupier rakes to move colored counters representing RAF and German aircraft. RAF officers radioed orders to the nine No. 11 Group operations centers—“sector stations”—scattered throughout the southeast and around London. There, orders were radioed to commanders of fighter squadrons, who then led their pilots aloft. German pilots listened in confusion as British pilots received updates by radio, updates that guided them toward the German fighters. How, the Germans wondered, could someone on the ground know where distant German planes were and where they were heading? They did not know that they faced two enemies in the Battle of Britain: RAF airmen in the sky and British radar crews on the ground.190

  It was now possible for the British to detect enemy aircraft approaching England’s shores while they were still as far as 120 miles away—thirty or more miles inside Belgium and France, and more than 70 miles beyond Calais—flying at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Although the RAF’s long-range radar could peer 30 or so miles into the Low Countries and France, the altitude at which radar could “see” enemy aircraft increased with distance, due to the curvature of the earth. At the extreme range of the radar, that altitude was almost 14,000 feet. Anything flying beneath that altitude, at that range, was “below” the radar. The calculus of time, distance, fighter aircraft climb rate, altitude, and speed became absolutely critical, and would determine the outcome of the air battle over the Channel and the Kent promontory. The controllers at RAF sector stations, once notified by Bentley Priory of a radar fix, needed about five minutes to radio orders to fighter squadrons, during which time the German fighters climbed a further 6,000 to 8,000 feet. A Spitfire needed almost fifteen minutes to reach 20,000 feet. The Germans, therefore, had a head start of around twenty minutes. The “service ceiling” (maximum operational altitude) for both German and British fighter planes was beyond 35,000 feet, for German medium bombers beyond 26,000 feet. Not only could the RDF operators not “see” below certain altitudes, but they were finding that aircraft at tremendous altitudes disappeared from their sight. And all other RAF problems were compounded by the fact that a Luftwaffe squadron could cross the Channel at its narrowest point in five minutes.

  Arrayed against the RAF were three German Luftflotten (air fleets). Luftflotte 3 was stationed in France, Luftflotte 2 in Belgium, under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and Luftflotte 5 in Denmark and Norway. Because of the distances Luftflotte 5 had to fly, and the short range of Germany’s best fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the bombers of Luftflotte 5 would have to fly without escorts. The burden of carrying out the German attack would therefore fall on Luftflotten 2 and 3, with a combined strength of 750 bombers, 250 Stuka dive-bombers, 600 Bf 109 fighters, and 250 twin-engine Bf 110 fighters. Hermann Göring issued his first operational directive for the Battle of Britain on June 30. The first step, code-named Kanalkampf, would be a struggle for mastery of the sky over the Channel.

  Over the Channel is not where Hugh Dowding thought the fight would take place. He believed the fight, when it came, would take place over southeast England, in No. 11 Group’s zone. The Germans kept a fleet of small seaplanes—white and marked with the Red Cross—at the ready, to rescue Luftwaffe pilots shot down over the Channel. British pilots who found themselves in the sea could only hope that a Royal Navy cutter or a local fisherman might happen upon them before they drowned, and many drowned. Göring intended to lure Dowding’s Spitfires and Hurricanes out over the Channel by the approach, at high altitude, of his Bf 109s. Then, Stuka dive-bombers, Bf 109s armed with a single 550-pound bomb, and Bf 110s carrying a single 2,200-pound bomb, would scoot far under the fray to attack coastal shipping, Royal Navy warships, and the Channel ports. One million tons of merchant shipping, escorted by the Royal Navy, passed through the Channel each week. Although the Battle of Britain is recalled in the collective consciousness as the first great clash of air forces in history—and it was—the German objective was to attain supremacy over the seas by attaining supremacy in the air. This, Göring pledged, was to be accomplished in July, setting the stage for “Adlerangriff” (“Eagle Attack”), the weeklong climactic assault on England’s military installations, railroad junctions, port facilities, oil depots, and aircraft factories, with the destruction of Fighter Command’s coastal airfields the first objective.191

  Dowding believed England’s only hope of survival lay in radar and the RAF’s s
ingle-engine fighters. He ordered his pilots to avoid direct combat with German fighters whenever possible, diverting them instead to shooting down enemy bombers stripped of their fighter escorts. Thus the RAF would keep its Spitfires and Hurricanes in the sky until the autumn’s worsening weather ruled out any possibility of a seaborne Nazi attack across the Channel.

  The Kanalkampf began on July 10, when twenty Nazi medium bombers, escorted by some two dozen twin-engine Bf 110 fighters and forty Messerschmitt Bf 109s, attacked a convoy off Dover. They were challenged by two squadrons (twenty-four to thirty aircraft) of Hurricanes. That day’s dogfights resulted in thirteen German and seven RAF planes going down, a ratio that would hold for the next two months. Heavy fighting—and these first collisions of the RAF and Luftwaffe were deadly—continued for a full month, most of it over the Channel and the southern coast of England. It was a testing time for both air forces, a time of feints, of probes, of changing tactics.

  And for the Royal Navy it was a time of terrible losses, from the air, from mines, from U-boats. Early in the month—before the main air battle opened on the tenth—the anti-aircraft ship Foylebank was sunk off Portland by a swarm of Stukas, with the loss of one hundred seventy of its three-hundred-man crew. A U-boat sank the destroyer Whirlwind south of Ireland, with forty-seven dead. On the eighteenth, two anti-submarine trawlers and a minesweeper were mauled; on the nineteenth and twenty-second, armed patrol trawlers were sunk by the Luftwaffe, with the loss of eleven men. Two British submarines went down off England’s shores that month, with the loss of seventy-seven crewmen. On the twenty-sixth, the destroyer Boreas was raked by the Luftwaffe, with twenty-one dead. The next day, the destroyer Wren was sunk off Dover and the destroyer Codrington was sunk off Suffolk, with thirty-six dead. So severe was the air attack on Dover that the Royal Navy pulled its destroyers from the port. This was exactly what Göring had set his sights on. On the twenty-ninth, the destroyer Delight was damaged in Portland harbor, with six dead. The remainder of the crew were rescued, but without a ship they were effectively out of action. The Royal Navy had more sailors killed in July than the RAF would lose pilots during the next two months. New sailors could be trained in a matter of weeks, but even the smallest gunboats took several months to build.

  Although the Royal Navy was being hit hard, it had no intention of withdrawing from the Strait of Dover without a fight. But Dowding took a hard line against daylight patrols in support of merchantmen and their naval escorts. Grudgingly, the Admiralty barred the strait to destroyers in daylight. The merchantmen were given a choice: either they reached Dover at dusk, in which case they would be escorted, or they entered the Channel naked.

  At dawn on August 8, twenty colliers took the risk. As the colliers formed themselves into a convoy off the Isle of Wight—a daily occurrence—Kriegsmarine radio operators at Wissant, opposite Folkestone, listened as the colliers and their Royal Navy escorts exchanged messages in preparation for the run through the Channel. A Luftwaffe strike followed. When the RDF station on the Isle of Wight picked up a strong blip, signaling the approach of a heavy raid, more than thirty Spitfires and Hurricanes went aloft to form an umbrella over the convoy. However, General Johannes Fink, after luring the RAF fighters away with decoys, sent in Stukas, which sank five ships and damaged seven others in less than ten minutes. The survivors scattered, tried to reassemble, and were attacked again, this time by a strong force of Stukas escorted by Bf-109s. The RAF lost sixteen planes, the Germans about twice that number.

  The attacks on shipping continued throughout August, with the toll of cargo ships, tankers, armed trawlers, and sailors mounting. Late in the month, the destroyer HMS Esk hit a mine and went down off the Dutch coast, taking almost 130 tars with her. The coordinated attacks of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were yielding results, but Göring did not pursue his objectives with alacrity. Rather than trade his replaceable planes for irreplaceable British ships, he preferred the glory that devolved upon the Luftwaffe when his pilots engaged the boys of the RAF head-on, high in the sky, where contrails wrote the story of each day’s heroics. German planes flying at 26,000 feet did not sink ships. The German army and navy high command, Churchill later wrote, “regretted the lower priority assigned by Göring to the naval targets, and were irked by the delays.”192

  Britain regretted the Kanalkampf sinkings but could spare the ships. On Friday evening, August 9, Churchill dined at Chequers with Pound, Ismay, Eden, Dill, and General Sir Archibald Wavell. Even under the threat of invasion Churchill cherished plans for British offensives. After the women had retired to the drawing room, he spoke at length about de Gaulle’s plan for an invasion of French North Africa, supported by the Royal Navy, at Dakar. His view of that day’s losses in the strait was philosophical; England, he said, would have to continue using her coastal vessels as bait, though he acknowledged that “the surviving bait are getting a bit fed up.” Pound, also undiscouraged, said that they “even had a surplus of coasting vessels.”193

  During July, the RAF lost 70 aircraft and the Luftwaffe more than 180, more than half of them bombers. On neither side was the damage mortal. British spirits were high. All Britain was aroused by the RAF’s heroism. The young pilots knew that every Englishman’s eye was on them; they were, in Liddell Hart’s phrase, “the heroes of the nation.”194

  Each day the German raids grew heavier and more frequent. Afterward, those who fought in the sky were haunted less by memories of fear—their engagements rarely lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—than by the relentless tension and nerve-sapping fatigue. After a third or fourth sortie, men would fall asleep in their cockpits as soon as they had landed. Two or even three more sorties would lie ahead of them, and although they may have brushed death more than once, their weariness was so great that when dusk fell and darkness gathered, they had no immediate recollection of that day’s fighting, not even of their kills. They awoke to the BBC’s report of the latest score and, thus rejuvenated by the BBC and the miraculous powers of youth, would head for the village pub.195

  All of England and all of Germany—indeed, the entire world—anxiously awaited each day’s scores, upon which the outcome of the battle, and the likelihood of invasion, seemed to hang. No. 10 echoed with hurrahs after the Air Ministry reported, typically: “The final figures for today’s fighting are 85 certain, 34 probable, 33 damaged. We lost 37 aircraft. 12 pilots being killed and 14 wounded.” After dinner on Saturday, July 13, Colville wrote in his diary: “Winston said the last four days have been the most glorious in the history of the RAF. Those days have been the test: the enemy had come and had lost five to one. We could now be confident of our superiority.”196

  Churchill believed it. He was citing the figures he had been given, and no one had deliberately deceived him. No one was deliberately misleading the Führer either, but the numbers sent to his Luftwaffe commanders were very different. According to them, those days had been among the most glorious days in Luftwaffe history, and therefore clear evidence of German superiority. In retrospect it is clear that the communiqués being issued by both sides were quite worthless.

  The RAF accepted their pilots’ claims of German trophies without question. However, British accounts of their own losses were always correct. That was not true of Luftwaffe reports. Announcing light casualties for the Luftwaffe and severe British losses was a mighty tonic for Reich morale, and Germans concluded that their airmen were winning the battle.

  One problem with deception is that the deceivers deceive themselves. That is what happened to the Luftwaffe’s high command. “The Germans,” as Churchill told Parliament later in the war, had “become victims of their own lies.” The Germans had lost control of the battle’s vital statistics, which, by the beginning of August, had become simply incredible. At one point William L. Shirer observed dryly: “German figures of British losses have been rising all evening. First (they) announced 73 British planes shot down against 14 German; then 79 to 14; finally at midnight 89 to 17. Actually, when I
counted up the German figures as given out from time to time during the afternoon and evening, they totaled 111 for British losses. The Luftwaffe is lying so fast it isn’t consistent even by its own account.”197

  At his country estate Göring studied these bogus figures, counted the number of British ships sunk, and declared that the Kanalkampf had been a stunning German victory. After the French capitulation, he had been told that the Royal Air Force had been reduced to fewer than two thousand frontline aircraft, of which between five hundred and six hundred were fighters. That was largely true—then. The Reichsmarschall had written the number on a pad of paper and pocketed it. In the fighting that followed, he subtracted the day’s losses, as reported to him, at the end of each day. In a Luftwaffe intelligence report dated August 16, he read that the British had lost 574 fighters since July, and that since their factories had provided them with no more than 300, they were left with about 430, of which perhaps 300 were serviceable.

  As the remainder on Göring’s pad approached zero, he was confident that the invasion could soon begin. But German pilots knew that RAF squadrons were still defending Britain’s skies. The Reichsmarschall was confused. He would have despaired had he been shown the latest figures from Ministry of Aircraft Production in London. In July alone, British workers had produced 496 fighter planes, four times the monthly rate before Dunkirk. By the end of August, Beaverbrook made 1,081 fighters available, with another 500 undergoing repair. Dowding, it seemed, would end the battle in the skies over England with more fighters than he had at the beginning.198