The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  By the first week in September, the RAF was in desperate straits. Dowding’s pilots were no longer permitted to pursue enemy aircraft out over the Channel. Because he lacked rested and refitted squadrons, he could no longer rotate them. In just two weeks he had lost 230 pilots, killed and wounded—25 percent of his pilots. At that rate, in another week Fighter Command would cease to be a disciplined fighting force. The entire air-defense system of southeast England was in danger of destruction. Already the Luftwaffe could very nearly do what it pleased over the area that Sea Lion had targeted for invasion. “If what Göring wanted was air superiority over southeast England for the invasion,” Deighton writes, “then by 1 September it was almost his.” Air Marshal Park wrote that “an almost complete disorganization made the control of our fighter squadrons completely difficult…. Had the enemy continued his heavy attacks (against fields and the control system)… the fighter defenses of London would have been in a perilous state.” Group captain Peter Townsend believed that “on 6th September victory was in the Luftwaffe’s grasp.” On September 7, he said, Wehrmacht divisions, panzers, and artillery “could have begun massive landings on British soil.”218

  But the key event determining the outcome of the air battle had taken place on the night of August 23–24. It was a matter of chance. A few of 170 German Heinkels that had been ordered to bomb oil installations at Thames Haven and Rochester became lost. Before turning for home, they jettisoned their bombs. As it happened, the lost raiders were over London. Fleeing homeward, they left behind raging fires in Bethnal Green and East Ham.219

  This was an error Hitler could not countenance. He had issued a directive to the Luftwaffe: “Attacks against the London area and terror attacks are reserved for the Führer’s decision.” This was a political rather than a strictly military decree. He was still hoping to bring Churchill to the conference table.220

  Churchill saw his chance. A month earlier he had sought from the Air Ministry a guarantee that were the Germans to bomb residential areas of London, Bomber Command would be ready “to return the compliment the next day against Berlin.” The night following the errant German attack on London—August 25—eighty-one twin-engine Wellingtons and Hampdens carried the war to the heart of the Reich. Berlin was covered with dense cloud; only half the bombers found it. Railroad yards and utilities were the targets. Damage was slight. Ten German men were killed by a bomb that fell near the Görlitzer railroad station, and the Siemens electrical works suffered a temporary loss of production. Unable to locate their targets, many of the British pilots brought their planes home still fully loaded with bombs.221

  The following morning Churchill sent a memo to the Chiefs of Air Staff: “Now that they have begun to molest the capital, I want you to hit them hard, and Berlin is the place to hit them.”222

  The British had been targeting German military and industrial targets since May—sporadic raids over the Kiel Canal, Rhine River shipping, railroad junctions. But until that Sunday night, no bomb had fallen on the capital of the Reich. William L. Shirer wrote in his diary: “The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could ever happen. When the war began, Göring had assured them that it couldn’t…. They believed him. Their disillusionment today is all the greater. You have to see their faces to believe it…. For the first time the war has been brought home to them.” 223

  The club-footed Nazi propaganda minister and former so-called journalist Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels ordered German newspapers to run the headline EIGER ENGLISCHER AGRIFF (Cowardly British Attack). The bombers came again on August 28 and again the following night, and after the third raid, the headlines in the Nazi press screamed, ENGLISCHE LUFTPIRATEN ÜBER BERLIN! (English Air Pirates over Berlin!)224

  Bombing cities was still an issue in 1940. Both the Hague and the Geneva Conventions—which the Reich was pledged to support—outlawed indiscriminate assaults on peaceful civilians. In May, when a flight of Heinkels had mistakenly killed nearly a hundred German women and children in the old university city of Freiburg im Breisgau, the Germans had blamed it on the RAF. A Nazi communiqué had reported it as an “enemy attack.” Goebbels condemned it as the “Kindermord in Freiburg” (the “murder of the innocents in Freiburg”), and the British traitor Lord Haw-Haw had denounced it as a “perfectly substantiated atrocity.”225

  Granting London immunity had never been popular in the Luftwaffe. As the autumn of 1940 approached and with no victory in the skies over England, Göring repeatedly asked Hitler to reconsider. Discontent was particularly keen among German fighter pilots. In his postwar memoirs, Adolph Galland—then a Luftwaffe major and fighter pilot, later a general—described London as a target “of exceptional military importance, as the brain and nerve center of the British High Command, as a port, and as a center for armament and distribution.” He wrote, “We fighter pilots, discouraged by a task which was beyond our strength, were looking forward impatiently and excitedly to the start of the bomber attacks.”226

  So was Göring, who, unaware of how much damage he had inflicted on the RAF, argued that a strategic shift from fighters over Dover to bombers over London might bring about the hoped-for peace conference, and preserve the Luftwaffe’s reputation in the bargain. Göring, Shirer later wrote, made a mistake “comparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24.” Admiral Raeder, too, championed terror attacks against London, in part as a means to preserve his navy, which he believed would be destroyed in an invasion attempt. If the Luftwaffe and the threat of invasion could not force Churchill to the conference table, perhaps a panicked London citizenry might do so. On August 31 Hitler approved massed raids—by day and night—against the London docks. They were to begin in a week.227

  On September 4 Hitler delivered a withering attack on the British leadership in Berlin’s Sportpalast, a winter sports arena and the largest meeting hall in the capital. Addressing an audience of social workers and nurses, he dismissed Minister of Information Duff Cooper as a “Krampfhenne” (a Bavarian word for “a nervous old hen”), and said, “The babbling of Mr. Churchill or Mr. Eden—reverence for old age forbids the mention of Mr. Chamberlain—doesn’t mean a thing to the German people. At best, it makes them laugh.” He then took up the bombings. “Mr. Churchill,” he said, “is demonstrating his new brain child, the night air raid.” Hitler said he had believed that such madness would be stopped, but “Herr Churchill took that for a sign of weakness.” Now he would learn better: “We will raze their cities to the ground!” He shouted, “The hour will come when one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany!” The women leapt to their feet, joyfully shouting, “Never! Never!”

  Hitler knew that the British were wondering when his invasion would begin. He said, “In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be calm, he’s coming! Be calm, he’s coming!”228

  Yet to those who knew the Führer and his byzantine court, there was an air of uncertainty about the Reich’s intentions. After listening to Hitler’s speech, Count Ciano was baffled. Something about it was not quite right. He wrote in his diary that Hitler seemed “unaccountably nervous.”229

  He was. He had conquered France in six weeks. Now, almost twelve weeks after the French surrender, the English—their army weak but rebuilding, their navy spread thin, their air force down on one knee—had fought him to a standstill. The strategic shift to massed bombings was his last option. If it worked, he would not need to invade England. But on that account, time was not on his side. Churchill understood that there existed one condition among many necessary, though not sufficient, for a successful invasion of England, a circumstance over which nobody had any control and that defied accurate prediction. To launch an invasion, according to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Germans were dependent upon “a calm sea and restricted visibility.” The Channel weather in autumn, when it deteriorated into “equinoctial gales” (as Churchill called them) could prove England’s most st
eadfast ally. The North Sea in autumn was no place for flat-bottomed river barges made top-heavy by troops, artillery, and tanks. In winter it was even worse, and each day that passed brought winter one day closer. That was reassuring; that it was still only early September was not.230

  On September 6, the Joint Intelligence Committee pored over a sheaf of reports, Enigma decrypts, and aerial photographs. The evidence before them seemed compelling. Enigma decrypts reported that all German army leave had been stopped; maps of English coastal areas had been issued to German officers in Normandy; the transfer of dive-bombers from Norway to France was complete; aerial photographs showed a “large-scale and disciplined” massing of barges (Sturmboote) in the Channel ports. Forty-eight hours after that moon and tide, the reports concluded, conditions would be “particularly favorable” for enemy landings. Warning of the “large-scale and disciplined” movement of troop transports toward forward bases on the Channel, the committee concluded that the last enemy preparations were complete. The next afternoon, the seventh, the director of military intelligence told the Chiefs of Staff that the invasion was imminent. At Bletchley Park the Naval Intelligence Section concluded that the landings might begin the following day. The chiefs therefore ordered all defense forces in the United Kingdom to “stand by at immediate notice.” The Air Ministry issued an “Invasion Alert No. 1” to all RAF commands, signaling the expectation that the Germans could be expected within the next twenty-four hours.231

  Late on the cloudless afternoon of Saturday, September 7, Hermann Göring and Albert Kesselring stood with their staffs on the cliffs of Cap Blanc Nez, opposite the White Cliffs of Dover, and watched their huge formation of Luftflotten, one thousand aircraft, a third of them bombers, cross the Channel and head for London. It was an awesome spectacle. The enormous armada seemed to shut out the sun and rose nearly two miles high.232

  The RAF had no warning that London was the target. At 4:00 P.M. Dowding was at his desk in Bentley Priory when he was told British radar had picked up the huge formations approaching from Calais. During previous Luftwaffe raids, including over the past few days, the raiders had split up upon reaching the coast, where British fighters patrolling at 25,000 feet waited for that moment to pounce. On this day that moment never came. Valhalla was German slang for an extraordinarily large formation of aircraft. Wave after wave of Valhallas crossed the east coast of Kent, near Deal, and headed straight for London. Eagle Attack was still under way; the targets were industrial centers along the Thames. The Germans hit Woolwich Arsenal first, then the Victoria and Albert Docks, the West India Dock, the Commercial Dock, and the Surrey Docks. Behind them they left a flaming vision of apocalypse. Ships were sunk, catwalks mangled, cranes toppled, and fires set that covered 250 acres and served as a beacon for a second heavy raid. Many German bombs missed their marks and fell into East End neighborhoods—civilian neighborhoods. At dusk that evening, observers in the West End took note of what appeared to be a spectacular sunset. But the glow came from the east. The observers quickly grasped the horrific truth: this was not the tangerine handiwork of the setting sun; the East End was burning.233

  In the late spring of 1940 it was decreed that the bells of London’s churches, which had pealed morning wake-up and evening curfew and called London’s faithful to Sunday service for almost three centuries, would ring now only to announce Cromwell, the code word that would alert all Britain to an imminent invasion. When the Chiefs of Staff ordered all troops in Britain to full readiness, that was enough for the Home Guard. At 7:30 they proclaimed Cromwell. Church bells throughout the kingdom rang out their warning. Men deployed. Civilians readied their homemade weapons. The Royal Engineers blew up key bridges, and in the confusion, several civilians were injured stumbling over hastily laid mines.234

  It was a false alarm. No Germans arrived by sea, but for Londoners, the terror from the skies had begun. Given the hideous glow churning the clouds high above the East End, it would not have been unreasonable had Londoners concluded that their city was soon to be reduced to cinders and ash.235

  The next day Home Forces commander Sir Alan Brooke told his diary of the night’s heavy bombing and fires, and added, “Went to the office in the morning, where I found further indications of impending invasion.” He predicted that the next few weeks would prove “the most eventful weeks in the history of the British Empire.” The full moon and tides would align the next week. The Germans had not come during the July moon, or the August. They would have to come in the next ten days, or take their chances in October, when the weather, their ally since June, would become their enemy.236

  To oppose an invasion, reinvigorate the blockade, and hunt U-boats, Churchill needed more destroyers. Help in that regard—very modest help—was on the way at last, but at a price. Franklin Roosevelt’s position on sending destroyers to Churchill had shifted (just slightly) between May and late August, a period of twelve weeks during which Churchill fumed to the cabinet that “although the president is our best friend, no practical help has been forthcoming from the United States as yet. We have not expected them to send military aid [troops or pilots], but they have not even sent any worthy contribution in destroyers or planes.” At one point, the kingdom’s finances looked so bleak that Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood suggested requisitioning the nation’s gold wedding rings in order to raise twenty million pounds. Churchill approved the plan but suggested it be implemented at a later date, not to retain the twenty million in gold but “for the purpose of shaming the Americans” if for lack of American help England’s fortunes should evaporate.237

  Churchill followed up his original request to Roosevelt for destroyers with another, and another, and another. His missives to Roosevelt became increasingly desperate, the memos to staff more disdainful of the timeliness and quality of American help. To HMG’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, in June: “We really have had no help worth speaking of from the United States so far.” That month had been the low point, symbolized perhaps by Henry Ford’s refusal to produce engines for British planes for fear his sales of new cars to Americans might be hurt, to say nothing of getting paid were England to lose, as Ford thought likely. In a late July telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill simply begged: “It has now become most urgent for you to give us the destroyers, motor boats and flying boats for which we have asked…. Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”238

  Churchill lowered his request to forty ships, and then he raised it to sixty. He cautioned Roosevelt that the Italians, by sending some of their submarines into the Atlantic (Mussolini had more than one hundred, more even than Germany), could help the Germans isolate England. He informed the president that ten British destroyers had been sunk in ten days, and almost one-third of the Royal Navy destroyer fleet had been lost since the start of the war. And he linked the destroyers to his strategic plans for the following year: “Our intention is to have a strong army fighting in France for the campaign of 1941.” Finally, he told Roosevelt that “time is all important,” for it would not be until February that British production of destroyers and anti-submarine craft could fill the shipping gap, which, however, could be filled by the prompt delivery of U.S. destroyers.239

  By mid-August, more than three months after Churchill’s first plea for older destroyers, Roosevelt began to believe that Britain might, just might, hold on. Ignoring both the isolationists and the Neutrality Acts, the president sent Churchill a message through the State Department in which he proposed a two-pronged deal: a guarantee from England that its Home Fleet would sail to Canada were the Home Island to find itself in extremis, and a straight-up swap of several British naval bases for the American ships. The negotiations for the destroyers imparted a certain sticky relativism to the concept of U.S. neutrality. Germany and Italy, with whom America was not at war after all, would receive no such friendly overtures. Regardless of the sovereign right of nations to trade with any combatant not under le
gal blockade, a transfer of fifty destroyers to Britain was a clear step in the direction toward war, and that pleased Churchill. But the terms Roosevelt proposed did not. Churchill told Colville that Roosevelt wanted to put a “lien” on the British fleet in return for the destroyers. It was not the deal he expected; in fact, he expected a gift, with no strings attached, and told Roosevelt so: “I had not contemplated anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or sale between us” but rather “a separate spontaneous act.” Cadogan found Churchill “rather incensed” over Roosevelt’s proposed swap. Churchill, Cadogan jotted in his diary, “says he doesn’t mind if we don’t get destroyers.” But of course he did.240

  Churchill could not abide Roosevelt’s linking the destroyers to a guarantee that were England to fall, its Atlantic fleet would run westward to Canada. He complained in a letter to Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King that the Americans sought to “get the British fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain.” In essence, were the United States to lose a friend, it would gain a fleet. It was the same sort of guarantee the British had wanted from the French. Yet the United States was a noncombatant, not an ally fighting alongside the British as the British had fought alongside the French. Churchill, not pleased, sent a cool response to the president on August 31: “You ask, Mr. President, whether my statement in Parliament on June 4th, 1940, about Great Britain never surrendering or scuttling her Fleet ‘represents the settled policy of His Majesty’s Government.’ It certainly does. I must, however, observe that those hypothetical contingencies seem more likely to concern the German fleet or what is left of it than our own.”241