The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Moreover, the wrecks of aircraft downed over Britain could be recovered by Beaverbrook’s Civilian Repair Organization. So efficient was the Beaver’s CRO that by the end of summer, one-third of Dowding’s fighters comprised parts from crashed Hurricanes and Spitfires. Indeed, through CRO ingenuity, crashed German planes flew again as RAF aircraft. On August 10, Colville noted in his diary: “Beaverbrook, he [Churchill] said, has genius, and, what is more, brutal ruthlessness.” Never in his life, “at the Ministry of Munitions or anywhere else,” had he seen “such startling results as Beaverbrook has produced.” After studying the Aircraft Production charts, General Sir Henry Pownell, who was with them, “agreed that there had never been such an achievement.” To be sure, it was a backbreaking job, and one from which the temperamental Canadian was forever resigning. Churchill wouldn’t allow it. On September 2, at the end of one memorandum to the prime minister, Beaverbrook lamented, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.” Beneath it Churchill wrote, “I do.”199

  An elated Göring put his statistics before Hitler, declaring that the RAF was helpless. The Reich, he said, had mastered the sky over Der Bach (the German nickname for the Channel). Now, he proposed preparations for the second phase of the battle: der Adlerangriff, the Eagle Attack—Germany’s all-out air assault in England. Yet Dowding was noting in his journal that he still believed time was on England’s side “if we can only hold on.” That day his pilots claimed to have destroyed sixty German planes, and though he may have thought that figure suspect, he was impressed by the skill with which the young Englishwomen at his radar stations had interpreted the direction and ranges of the attackers. In the long run, if the RAF were to prevail, the performance of the WAAF would be crucial.200

  Luftwaffe airmen were as dangerous as ever. Their superiors were not. Officers of higher ranks committed the blunders and mismanagement within the Luftwaffe. The intelligence that Göring was receiving was appalling. The Germans had only a meager understanding of the British defense system; indeed, at the outset they didn’t know where key British airfields were. Operational maps did not distinguish between fields used by Fighter and Bomber Commands. The two factories where Rolls-Royce built the Merlin engines that powered Hurricanes and Spitfires were never bombed, though their location was no secret. Vital orders miscarried. Weather reports were unreliable. Staff work was slow and sloppy. Göring summoned his generals and ordered that under no circumstances should he be disturbed by subordinates in search of guidance. Worst of all, he adopted no coherent strategy, no priority of targets. After the war, Adolph Galland, one of his officers, wrote that “constantly changing orders betraying lack of purpose and obvious misjudgment of the situation by the Command and unjustified accusations had a most demoralizing effect on us fighter pilots.”201

  British RDF (radar) baffled the enemy. Picking up its signals, German airmen reported British radio stations with special installations. Nazi intelligence decided it was a communication system linking RAF pilots with ground controllers, and concluded, on August 7, that “as the British fighters are controlled from the ground by radio-telephone, their forces are tied to their respective ground stations and are therefore restricted in mobility,” which, had it been true, would have meant that resistance to mass German attacks was limited to local fighters.202

  The commander of the Luftwaffe Signals Service, who was among the few Germans who understood the role of radar, urged that an attack on the RDF stations be given priority. A limited attempt on them, made on the day before the first major assault on the British mainland, was ineffective. At Dover, the Germans rocked a radar pylon, but the 360-foot-tall lattice masts were almost impossible to hit; returning after an attempt to destroy four of them, the pilots reported total failure. Göring assumed that the British electronic gear and crews were deep underground and hence safe. (In fact they were in flimsy shacks beneath the towers.) He issued the order: “It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing the attacks on radar sites, in view of the fact that not one of those attacked has so far been put out of action.”203

  Nevertheless, this was still the mighty Luftwaffe, and its huge fleets of superb aircraft outnumbered the defenders by two to one. After the Kanalkampf, they completed plans for Adlertag (Eagle Day), the launch of Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack). The Führer, unaware that Göring’s figures were inflated, authorized him to open Adlerangriff. Depending on the weather and other imponderables, the Führerordnung (Führer Directive) decreed, Adlertag could fall as early as August 5. British intelligence officers in Bletchley Park relayed the decision to Churchill, and Dowding issued an Order of the Day to his men: “The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Members of the Royal Air Force, the fate of generations lies in your hands.”

  On August 6, the Reichsmarschall set Eagle Day for August 10, a Saturday. The weather forced him to reschedule it for the following Tuesday, when heavy skies were expected to clear. They did, and that morning, 74 twin-engine Dorniers (which could carry 2,200 pounds of bombs) and 50 Bf 109s took off. The clouds returned; Göring issued a recall order. That afternoon, the clouds rolled away and the offensive was officially on, targeting a 150-mile arc of southern England from the Thames estuary to Southampton. Commanding it was Göring’s ablest subordinate, Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commander of Luftflotte 2. Kesselring’s men called him “Smiling Albert” (he liked to flash his perfect enamels). He had much to smile about. Soon after daybreak every RAF radar tower in the southeast was sending urgent warnings to Dowding’s headquarters.204

  Among those awaiting the onslaught were a dozen American war correspondents on the cliffs of Dover, including H. R. Knickerbocker, Edward Murrow, Helen Kirkpatrick, Quentin Reynolds, Whitelaw Reid, Virginia Cowles, Eric Sevareid, and Vincent Sheean. Their mood was fatalistic. Among them, Sheean wrote, a “sense of inevitable tragedy had grown heavy.” Some had been covering the spread of global conflict since the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931. The Reich seemed invincible. They heard the familiar hum of the desynchronized Messerschmitts, Heinkels—the workhorses of the Luftwaffe, with a range of 1,250 miles and a bomb load capacity of 5,500 pounds—and Dorniers, which grew to a roar as the glittering wings of the great Nazi armada emerged from the dazzling sun-drenched mist over the Channel and approached a coast that had not seen an invader in nine centuries. Experience had taught the newsmen to expect another defeat for democracy.205

  And then, Sheean wrote, from RAF fields inland, they saw twenty-one squadrons—more than 300 aircraft—of challenging Spitfires rising “like larks, glittering against the sun,” maneuvering for position and attack. They heard the “zoom of one fighter diving over another… the rattle of machine-gun fire, the streak of smoke of a plane plummeting to earth, and the long seesaw descent of the wounded fighter falling from the clouds beneath his shining white parachute.” Sheean and his companions no doubt saw a great flotilla of RAF fighters, but they could not have all been Spitfires. On any given day, No. 11 and 12 Groups could count only about 250 operational Spitfires, and around 320 Hurricanes.206

  The scenes were repeated all that day and all week along the southern coast. Sheean wrote: “In every such battle I saw, the English had the best of it, and in every such battle they were greatly outnumbered.” Repeatedly “five or six fighters would engage twenty or thirty Germans…. I saw it happen not once but many times.” He remembered the Spaniards and the Czechs and wrote: “At Dover the first sharp thrust of hope penetrated our gloom. The battles over the cliffs proved that British could and would fight for their own freedom, if for nothing else, and that they would do so against colossal odds…. The flash of the Spitfire’s wing, then, through the misty glare of the summer sky, was the first flash of a sharpened sword; they would fight, they would hold out.”207

  The battle reached its peak between August 24 and September 6, which became known to Fighter Command as the critical period. In the five weeks of fighting between July 10 and August 13, Luftwaffe tactics had been tested by Dowding’s strat
egy. His orders to his pilots to avoid Messerschmitts, to flee from them if necessary and go after the German bombers, had paid off. Nazi fighters flying escort had been at a disadvantage; enemy bomber losses had continued to be high; and, far more important, the RAF continued to be a force in being, warding off the threat of invasion.

  With Eagle Day this pattern changed. Kesselring massed a great concentration of Messerschmitts in the Pas de Calais, in northern France. He meant to wipe out the sector airfields of Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group—London’s air defenses—leaving the capital naked. During this time Churchill repeatedly visited RAF bases at Stanmar, Uxbridge, Dover, and Ramsgate. These were the castle gates, from which its last defenders sallied forth, behind which all England waited. Colville noted that what Churchill saw at the bases “brought the war home to him.” The Germans, in fact, had brought the war to his home.208

  On Thursday, August 15, the Germans decided to test RAF Fighter Command’s strength by attacking it from all sides simultaneously. For the first time, Luftflotte 5 (Air Fleet 5), in Norway and Denmark, was assigned a major role, to sweep into northern England near Tyneside and seek out industrial targets near Newcastle and Bomber Command airfields. Luftflotte 5 sent one hundred bombers escorted by forty twin-engine Bf 110s. The distance from Denmark precluded the possibility of using single-engine Bf 109s to protect the bombers. The Germans paid dearly for their lack of fighter cover. Days earlier, Dowding had moved eighty Spitfire pilots and their planes north, to give both a needed rest. They rose to meet the attackers. The Germans lost sixteen Heinkels and six JU-88s—one-fifth of their bombers—and seven Bf 110s. There were no British losses. Throughout the Luftwaffe, that day became known as der schwarze Donnerstag: Black Thursday.209

  In the south, however, that day’s fighting was very different. Here the airfields of No. 11 Group were the targets. In Essex and Kent, airfields at Martlesham, Eastchurch, and Hawkinge were hit; then the enemy attacked two aircraft factories near Rochester and fighter fields at Portland, Middle Wallop, West Malling, and Croydon. Both sides suffered the highest losses for any single day. Before dusk the Germans had flown an unprecedented 1,786 sorties, and the total losses for both sides—109 aircraft—were the highest for any single day of the battle thus far.

  Churchill followed the day’s fighting from No. 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge, and he left clearly affected. Climbing into his limousine with Ismay, he said, “Don’t speak to me. I’m too moved.” His lips were trembling. They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Churchill turned to Ismay and said something that “burned into” Ismay’s mind, so much so that he went home that night and repeated the words to his wife.210

  Five days later, when the most difficult and dangerous period in the battle was about to begin, Churchill paused during a long address to the House of Commons on the overall war situation, and delivered his tribute to the RAF:

  The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge of mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and their devotion.

  Then, he spoke the words that had so moved Ismay: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Those words have become immortal, yet they were but a prelude to Churchill’s main point, the RAF bombing campaign:

  All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers, who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.211

  Bomber Command had more than six hundred medium and light bombers stationed on airfields north of London. Churchill did not intend to restrain them much longer.

  On Friday the sixteenth, Kesselring continued to press the attack. Luftflotte 5 was grounded—indeed, for the remainder of the battle—but the Germans put up more than 1,700 sorties, raiding airfields almost at will and bombing the hangars at Brize Norton flight-training school. That Sunday the Germans lost seventy-one aircraft, nearly 10 percent of those committed. Nevertheless, after a day’s lull the enemy again arrived in force, undiscouraged by the costs of the offensive.212

  Göring summoned his three Luftflotten commanders to Karinhall and ordered them to go after aircraft factories and steel mills as “bottleneck” targets. Four days later he summoned them again to announce: “We have reached the decisive period of the air war against England.” As in past conferences he was astonishingly ill-informed. He grossly underestimated the significance of Dowding’s radar chain, thus assuring its continued immunity, and his summation of Luftwaffe accomplishments in the battle was wildly unrealistic.213

  Nevertheless, Fighter Command’s situation was critical. Unlike the enemy, Britain had no bottomless reserve of trained pilots. RAF bomber pilots were being retrained to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes. In a single week Dowding had lost 80 percent of his squadron commanders. One of their replacements had never even flown a Hurricane, yet after just three landings and three takeoffs, he led his men into battle. Often pilots had logged no more than ten hours of flight before sighting an enemy fighter. In August, Fighter Command’s operational training period was cut from six months to two weeks. Some new pilots had never fired their guns. Some were boys in their teens.214

  The RAF pilots pushed the limits of human endurance, sleeping in their cockpits between sorties, “undaunted by odds,” in Churchill’s words, “unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger.” On the final day of August, accompanied by Clemmie, Pamela, and Colville, he drove to Uxbridge, the frenzied headquarters of Sir Keith Park’s No. 11 Group, controlling all the fighter squadrons in southeastern England. The rest of his party took walks in the countryside, but he wanted to talk to the airmen, look into their faces, and hear their stories. That evening Colville wrote: “The P.M. was deeply moved by what he saw this afternoon at Uxbridge.”215

  Park could replace his pilots but not his airfields. If the Germans knocked them out by bombing and strafing, British fighters could neither take off nor land; the Nazis would then command the air over southeast England, and Hitler’s invasion could begin. To protect No. 11 Group’s fields, Park told his pilots to engage the enemy as far out as possible, but when the Germans greatly increased the proportion of fighters to bombers, the Spitfires and Hurricanes of No. 12 Group had to stay behind to provide No. 11 Group fields with air cover, and there weren’t enough of them. The enemy onslaught was too great. Kesselring was putting up over a thousand sorties a day. Charging in from the sea each morning at an altitude too low for British guns, Bf 109s and 110s would sweep the RAF fields in strafing attacks, wrecking repair shops, destroying hangars, ripping apart grounded planes, leveling operations buildings, and leaving airstrips unfit for landing and taking off. The Bf 110s, armed with 2,200-pound bombs, were especially deadly. Once the RAF was shot out of the sky and its airfields smashed, Göring planned on sending his Bf 110s far inland in search of military and industrial targets.

  RAF ground crews worked heroically, but before new craters could be filled in, a second flight of raiders would arrive. By dusk all British communications were paralyzed, and when the operations rooms were reduced to ruins, the whole ground-control system failed. One by one the advanced fighting fields were abandoned. And on the tenth day of the new Nazi offensive, a dozen Ju 88s slipped through Britain’s fighter protection and hit the Vickers factory near We
ybridge, destroying the works and inflicting heavy casualties. The output of Wellington bombers dropped from ninety a week to four.216

  Minister of Information Duff Cooper told No. 10 that British morale was “extremely high,” but the public did not know what its leaders knew. Fighter Command was in crisis. Under Beaverbrook, British factories were producing 115 or more new fighters each week—twice as many as the Germans—but the Nazis were now shooting down more than that. Dowding’s aircraft reserve was shrinking. On the last two days of August, the Nazi attacks reached a crescendo with 2,795 sorties. Their primary targets continued to be No. 11 Group’s vital sector stations at Biggin Hill and Kenley. By September 1 both were destroyed. Hangars, aircraft repair shops, operations buildings, communication grids—all were leveled. Of No. 11 Group’s seven major airfields, six had been demolished and the five advanced airfields were hors de combat. Still, Churchill and Park conferred on the first and agreed that the Germans had reached their maximum effectiveness and “could not stand the strain much longer as far as an air offensive is concerned.”217

  Incredibly, the German high command didn’t grasp the implications of the Luftwaffe’s successes. An exception was Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, one of the Wehrmacht’s highest-ranking officers. Bock realized that the tide of battle had shifted; while preparing to move his army-group headquarters from France to Poland, he tried to impress upon his commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, the importance of the shift. Finding von Brauchitsch uncommunicative, Bock insisted that for the first time in the battle, the Luftwaffe was making some real headway.

  Every day now the Germans were coming in larger numbers and they were threatening Britain’s inner defenses. When, after a visit to Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, Churchill dined at Chequers with Dowding, Lindemann, and Gort, the enemy bombed Great Missenden, just four miles away.